The CREATE Strategy Benefits Students and Is a Natural Fit for Faculty

Abstract

Given how much time microbiologists spend reading and analyzing research articles, it is surprising that so many teach lecture courses based on textbooks, inadvertently depriving their students of the excitement of scientific discovery that comes with analyzing current research. Such faculty members typically spent years learning to do scientific research, designing experiments or carrying out observational studies, troubleshooting, and integrating findings from current literature with their hypothetical frameworks. As they developed more sophisticated insights into study design and data interpretation, including an awareness of the need to constantly challenge their own assumptions, future college faculty gained an ever-increasing fluency in the language of data analysis.