This activity, produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, helps students to develop skills in giving and receiving constructive criticism on their own and their peers' presentations. In doing so, students are encouraged to consider what makes a good presentation, identify the features of a good presenter and...

Produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, this activity helps students to improve their learning from listening. Podcasts, which can be downloaded onto a computer or portable audio player and listened to at any time, are revolutionising the way programmes and information are being disseminated. In this...

This activity, produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, is based on a popular game and helps students to develop skills of listening and communicating. Students have to understand and relay spoken information to their peers without losing its main content and meaning. This simple activity will help...

Produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, this activity helps students to critically evaluate scientific issues as they are portrayed in the media. Whilst in many cases little scientific evidence is presented in articles or television programmes, it does not necessarily follow that they are unreliable. This...

Produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, this activity gives students the opportunity to practise quickly skim-reading a text to assess its usefulness.

A guided activity asks students to quickly browse through a scientific article and extract information such as its title, author and the subject of...

Produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, the aim of this activity is to set the scene for subsequent activities in this skill area. A series of brief articles is presented to the students who complete individual or group exercises to explore and develop their approach to reading text. The activity helps...

These activities, produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, help students to look at a text, after an initial skim read, to judge if it is worth considering in more detail.

This ‘second glance’ activity serves several aims:
* It enables students to assess quickly what is the subject of the...

Produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, this activity enables students to learn about the basic structure and style of scientific articles. Students first test their ability to extract key information from informal or popular science articles. Initially, these are more accessible than research papers....

This activity, produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, enables students to develop their ability to gain a more detailed sense of the structure and subject matter of a scientific article. After completing the exercise, students should be able to: * locate the themes and keywords within an article *...

Produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, this activity helps students to consider how useful and informative article titles are.

During the activity, students:
* browse a scientific article.
* look for information such as the author, publication date and content of the abstract.
*...

These activities, produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, help students to identify different sections in scientific texts which help to create an order and logical progression of the information conveyed. It encourages students to look at how the information is split into several principal types and...

Produced by Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme, this activity revisits the skim reading skills developed earlier in the series. It requires students to think about what makes a title useful and how to write titles themselves. Students consider what the purpose of a title is and why an author may write a catchy...