However, students must have good inputs in order to have good outputs: that is, their academic writing will not improve unless their inputs are of good quality. So to get to the 'right' academic writing standard, they must be reading and processing academic/journal articles.
In my experience, getting better at reading journal articles is a matter of practice. The more we tackle reading this type of work, the better we get at understanding them. Given the will to apply themselves, I have seen that any student can tackle them. What is often missing is a strategy to approach each piece. To chunk down how much is tackled at any one time. To create familiarisation. To not try to eat the entire elephant at once (Gilbert, 1992).
I suggest that students new to reading academic materials begin to build their 'muscles' by tacking articles in the following way:
- Read the abstract.
- Then read the conclusion.
- Then come back and read the introduction.
- If - after reading these three elements - there is nothing that relates to our project, we stop reading.
- If the work does relate to what we are doing, then read the discussion.
- Lastly, we can review the whole article, including the method.
- We make notes from the bits which strongly relate to our work.
- We look up the sources for those bits in the reference list ("reference mining").
- Then when we are looking for our next article, we check out the key words in that article to see if any of them might relate to what we are doing.
- We then find the other source articles, and read those articles, following the same format.
In each section there are a range of questions to ask ourselves:
- "Does anything apply to my project?"
- "Are there similarities in this work and what I am proposing to do?"
- "Are the participants similar to mine?"
- "Are the results similar to what I am expecting to get?"
- "Is the context similar to my context?"
- "Are the methods similar to my proposed methods?"
If we answer yes to any of the questions above, we make notes from that paper on that section. Then we repeat - we move onto the next source.
That usually works to get us started.
Sam
References:
Gilbert, J. (1992). How to Eat an Elephant: A slice by slice guide to total quality management. Tudor Business Publishing.
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