Few people will read magazines with peer-reviewed scientific articles for their enjoyment. There are no such magazines – they are a medium for scientists with whom they can share their findings. Scientists in particular must be able to understand the articles in them, and of course students who are trained to become scientists. The latter, however, appears to be rather disappointing, especially first year students do not understand scientific articles as well as they always thought. But fortunately there is something to be done about this.

Some educational experts studied the understanding of academic texts among students, and discovered that this is only really realized at a late stage of the study. This is caused by the fact that academic articles are very different in scope from texts in school books. In textbooks, the material is often explained as linearly as possible, from A to Z. At secondary school, students are taught to read texts linearly. Writers of scientific articles on the other hand try with their texts to convince the reader of their right, and often use a more complex language structure. As a reader of such texts, you sometimes have to start at Z, and then finally return to Z via A and M. That change in reading does not seem to be good for first-year students.

The educational experts discovered this in their research. The students had to read scientific articles about a biological subject for the course Biomedical Research. Then the researchers asked the students which conclusions they could extract from the articles, and what they thought was the basis for this. This showed that the students did not recognize fragments in the text that have a certain communicative function, so-called rhetorical moves such as the research question, the motive or the conclusion. They sometimes came up with conclusions that could not be retrieved from the article.

So there was a lot wrong with the reading method of the students. Based on this, the educationalists developed an educational model to help students better recognize those rhetorical moves. The students, in general, need to be trained to read scientific articles. They need to know about how scientific literature works.

In fact, many university programs assume that students can understand texts, something that is far from the truth. But certainly, the scientific reading is just as important as learning to write such articles. By reading a lot of scientific literature, students will be familiar with the literature. These habits will eventually guide them automatically, when they are faced with a writing assignment. Academic papers are very important in any formal education, especially argumentative essays. By making an argumentative essay students will learn to express their opinions about a subject matter. This is an important transformation from just reading to expressing ideas to others. Today essays are often seen as one of the graduation requirements and if you are a student, you can buy your essay for college graduation and get a better grade!