I'm going to assume for a second that I understand the article and the prompt! In my discipline, we spend a fair amount of time teaching students how to get through primary research articles. This usually involves teaching them the structure of a journal article, understanding the purpose of the study, what the researchers did, and what they concluded. In my WIC class, I take this a step further and teach them to read primary research as a rhetorical work. I want them to understand that in the intro, the author is setting them up by cherry picking research that supports the purpose of their study. Everything about the research is then to argue that their methods were appropriate to support their purpose, their results supported (or didn't) their hypothesis, and their conclusions were justified based on their results. They even explain away the counterargument and bring the reader back around to the solidity of their results, just like a rhetorical essay does! Their major writing assignment uses primary research to support an argument of their own. I think that reading research from this lens really changes it for them. They no longer get bogged down in the methodology and the statistics. Instead, they read research as an argument paper. It also helps them understand that you can make science say what you want it to say, 98% of the time!

Most of the Corvallis sections of this class do not have students write this way. They have them do a lit review or even carry out a mini research study. Personally I like my approach because it helps students understand research as a means to support a theory (argument) rather than just synthesizing the results from multiple studies into a lit review, which basically just says, "this is what we know." It stops short of making students really think about what we DON'T know and/or how to use what we know to "prove a point."