Students will be able to evaluate and interpret data in scientific literature and other sources.

Throughout every biology course I have taken during my 4 years at Longwood there has always been a strong emphasis in understanding and interpreting literature. Many of the introductory courses required students to complete article reflections or reviews. These article reflections exposed me to various kinds of articles and topics, and provided me the necessary skills to interpret literature from various subjects. This exposure allowed me to interpret what was a good article and what was a not so good article, which is important when conducting background research.

The ability to understand literature is what helped me in my Sophomore Seminar class (BIOL 288). In this course we were tasked with completing a literature review. For the literature review we had to find at minimum 15 sources to utilize in our review. During this time I was really interested in allergies in humans and in the end I had over 20 sources for this paper. The skills that I had learned in my introductory class allowed me to pull out the main points from my sources as well as determine what was a good source and what was a bad one. This literature review helped me learn to summarize and put information from many sources together.