Students will be able to evaluate and interpret data in scientific literature and other
sources.
In every biology class I have taken at Longwood we have had to read a scientific article or literature of some type. I believe throughout my four years it has become increasingly easier to analyze and understand the experiments done and what the data/results are saying. When I was a freshman I think it was definitely very hard to read these as it was some of the first that I have really read in depth, but by having to do it a lot it has become a lot easier to understand.
In biology 425 Modern Genetics I had to find a related article to the topic we were discussing, read, and write a report of said article almost every week. This really helped me because I had to search to find a significant article and then present it to my class. Each time we had to pick a figure or graph from the article and explain what it is saying and why it is important to the research. This was definitely a learning curve because sometimes there were so many moving parts to the figures it t0ok awhile to actually get what they were saying, but it was also very informative and gave ideas on how to make figures in my own research.