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Scientific knowledge, including the critical evaluation and comprehension of empirical articles, is a key skill valued by most undergraduate institutions for students within the sciences. Students often find it difficult to not only summarize empirical journal articles, but moreover to successfully grasp the quality and rigor of investigation behind the source. In this paper, we use instructional scaffolds (reading worksheets, RWs, with tutorials) to aid students in being able to comprehend, and ultimately transfer, the skills necessary in critically evaluating primary sources of research. We assess students' learning of these skills on a multiple-choice assessment of Journal Article Comprehension (JAC). Students in experimental classes, who received instructional scaffolds, improved on the JAC post-test compared with students in control classes. This result shows that students are acquiring fundamental research skills such as understanding the components of research articles. We also showed that improvement on the JAC post-test for the experimental class extended to a written summary test. This result suggests that students in the experimental group are developing discipline-specific science process skills that allow them to apply JAC skills to a near-transfer task of writing a summary.

Argument diagramming is the process of spatially representing an argument by its component parts and their relationships. A growing body of evidence supports the use of argument diagramming to aid student learning and writing within disciplines including science education. However, most of these studies have focused on basic contrasts between diagramming and no diagramming. The purpose of this study was to learn how different diagramming frameworks affect the benefits afforded by argument diagramming. Three groups of undergraduate students in psychology research methods lab courses were given either no diagramming support, support with a domain-general framework, or support with a domain-specific framework to help them write a research paper introduction. Students given any diagramming support included more relevant citations and considered opposing citations in their papers. Students using the domain-specific framework wrote more about the scientific validity of cited studies than the other two groups, whereas students using the domain-general framework trended towards included more supporting citations.