Abstract:

Student work is the axis of the education activities in the European Space for Higher Education. Thus, teachers are supposed to innovate in teaching in order to facilitate and evaluate learning. In this context, we have tested the use of reading and analyzing research papers as a tool to promote stimulation of learning and improve concepts assimilation. Before initiating this activity, we have carefully selected some research papers that are related to the topics of the subject “Plant in vitro culture and genetic transformation” and that could be easily retrieved from on-line University resources. The number of students in this particular case is 82. This subject has two sessions a week of 1.5 h and 2 h, respectively, and includes several topics and methodologies. The activity consists of three steps: day-1) the lecturer tells students at the end of a class to get a selected paper and bring it the next class, day-2) after an hour of theoretical class the lecturer introduces the paper and invites students to read carefully the abstract, and day-3) students read the paper and analyze one section of the paper (for instance materials and methods) or are asked to comment a table or a figure. During this entire activity, the lecturer answers queries about the meaning of some words or concepts that are not clear. This analysis is given to lecturer at the end of the class when the activity proposed is explained by the lecturer using the blackboard. At the end of the year, related-activity questions were answered by students in order to test if this activity has resulted interesting for them and/or helped to understand better the concepts and processes explained in this subject. Eighty per cent of students considered interesting this activity; 19% indifferent, and 1% boring. Regarding questions related to the usefulness of this activity in the student formation 12% consider this activity very formative; 41% formative, and 12% indifferent. The questions also reflected that the difficulty of the activity is medium (with a 72% of students that answered this option) and that this methodology is preferred versus a standard theoretical class (84%). These results indicate that, in this subject the activity tested resulted interesting for students and helped to assimilate the concepts.

Keywords:

Research, teaching, in vitro culture, genetic transformation, scientific papers.