Developing Graduate Research Skills using Guided Reading Assignments

An important skill for graduate engineering students is the ability to perform research and communicate their findings.Many graduate courses address this need by requiring students to write a research paper.Unfortunately, many graduate students lack sufficient experience in compiling information from a variety of technical sources and presenting these results.We have addressed this problem by adding guided reading assignments to assist students in the research process.The instructor specifies the initial articles, with the students eventually branching out into their own specific research areas.For each assignment, the student writes a short report that addresses certain aspects of each article.Using these reports, the instructor provides feedback to guide the student's research.We have found that these assignments aid the students in the literature review process and result in more focused research papers.In this paper, we discuss the specific procedure for creating and evaluating these assignments.