Homework

I sent out homework today. I’ve been working on the pre-consultation worksheet that will guide the mandatory consultation I have with all the students in my grant writing course. Last year I was involved in this course, but as a last minute instructor and the dates available had to be worked out on the side, making the session optional.

This year, I am a embedded instructor and as such, I am taking full opportunity to act as one. I had my lecture a few weeks ago about different resources, tools, and methods for searching. The students are required to write the specific aims, background, research methodology, and rationale for an R21 style NIH grant. I know they get their seed data to develop specific aims this week.

With that as a target, the worksheet asks them to define their research question, identify databases they will use, asks them if they are experienced use certain features of the databases, asks them for their choice of citation manager, asks them to build a basic search string from a combination of index terms and derived synonyms, and lastly looks to SCOPUS to identify key authors, and journals on their topic.

The consultations will be about an hour and we will discuss what gaps they might have in these skills. I’m looking forward to seeing what effect this will have on their course experience. The output still required that they synthesize the data, and I am not the one training them for that. I’m not sure how I would assess this either. Something to think about for the future.