Leading discussions is your chance to dive into primary literature, analyze and critique it, and ask the class open-ended questions about its contents. A good discussion engages your classmates and leads them to debate topics pertaining to ecology, evolution, and biodiversity with you and with each other. When you are leading a paper, you should be able to answer, and better yet, encourage the class to debate and ultimately answer the following questions:
- What are the main questions the researchers are trying to answer through their research?
- What are the organisms that are discussed in this paper? Why? What are the ecosystems they inhabit? What is our understanding of how these organisms function in their surroundings and with each other?
- How is the experiment designed? Is this an effective design? How could you make it better? What is the scale of the study?
- What do the figures tell us? What conclusions can we make from looking at the results? What do we learn from the conclusions? Did the researchers answer their initial questions, or different ones?
- How does this paper advance our knowledge of ecology, ecological theory, ecosystem interactions, ecosystem functioning? Why is this research important?
Be sure to address specific points that you find important, and if possible, relate papers to ideas brought up in class. You will be graded on your knowledge of the paper you are leading, your enthusiasm, thoroughness, and the quality of the questions you pose to your classmates to begin and maintain discussion.
