Science in the Classroom (SitC) is an educational resource designed to make scientific content accessible and understandable. SitC does not simply re-write primary research literature. Instead, we choose our papers carefully and build a web-based educational scaffold, which provides students with tools for interpretation. In essence, SitC is a collection of annotated research papers and accompanying teaching materials designed to help students at the advanced high school, community college, undergraduate, and graduate level understand the structure and workings of professional scientific research. 

Each annotated Science paper contains a Learning Lens, which is used to selectively highlight and explain the original text of the research article. An interactive glossary and an expanded explanation of the figures, often with a close-up of the relevant section of the figure itself, have been built into each annotated paper. (Figure 1) Also accompanying the papers is a supplemental document (referred to as an Educator Guide) with further explanation of the background materials, the authors experiments, the conclusions, the references, curriculum alignments, and other activities to help understand or apply the scientific research.  

Since 2012, SitC has published 125 STEM articles with more than 100 articles from the Science family of journals. During this grant period, the SitC team published 43 annotated research papers. All articles and their supporting educational materials are freely available to the education community and the public.  

To address the Intellectual Merit, SitC held four flagship workshops attended by more than 120 educators, curriculum specialists, and administrators. We also collaborated with universities across the country to hold four regional workshops that engaged more than 100 participants.  The professional development provided an opportunity to become familiar with the structure and uses of primary scientific literature, advantages for using primary literature with students, and how primary literature can support science and engineering practices. Utilizing SitC resources and tools with students exposes them to the process of science, an alternative to learning vocabulary words and concepts from a textbook. Workshop participants also developed new educational content connected with an article using tools learned in the workshop.  

Another important outcome of this project lies in the way these resources are developed. SitC collaborates with upper-class undergraduates (juniors and seniors), graduate students, postdocs, and professors who volunteer as SitC Contributors and write the annotations for us. Original authors then review and edit the annotations for scientific accuracy. (Figure 2)  

To further our collaboration with our Contributors communities, we offered an online course detailing the annotation process and providing a background on what we know about primary literature as an educational tool, how it has been used in different classrooms, and how it has been assessed. To date, 160 students, postdoctoral researchers, and professors have completed this course, and we onboard new students every two to three months.  (Figure 3) 

As SitC evolved, so did usage of the Learning Lens and annotation process. The annotation process itself is a learning activity, and several university-level classes incorporated the annotation training as part of their coursework.  Students learned the annotation process and worked together to develop annotations for a paper. This practice provided an opportunity for students to act as content developers and not just as content consumers  

The combination of the Annotator training and the Educator training with overlapping contributions created a Community of Practice, where students, educators, and authors, who would not usually connect with each other, now work together to make scientific content more accessible. In return, the Contributors (educators and annotators) gain valuable training in both writing for a general audience and developing educational resources (Figure 1), and the authors are able to expand the Broader Impacts of their research (Figure 2). To address Broader Impacts, we engaged undergraduates, at very early stages in their careers, to the scientific process. We also created a Community of Practice, where practicing scientists, students, and teachers work together to develop educational resources. 

In summary, SitC has been a successful and sustainable project. The continued interest of educators, volunteers and students each month and ongoing support from the authors has allowed SitC to publish over 125 articles to date. Subjects range from environmental science, neuroscience and behavior, disease and disorders, technology and engineering, and physics future publications will expand both the topics and disciplines covered, giving educators a large range of subject matter from which to choose. Each paper is designed to be used to illustrate general points about the way that science is done and the nature of scientific communication. Thus, the exact topic covered in class is less important to us than the fact that students will be exposed to an authentic science paper and learn how the authors use evidence to derive important new understandings. And for some, this encounter could ignite a passion to pursue science as a career.