Chemistry teachers increasingly use research articles in their undergraduate courses. This trend arises from current pedagogical emphasis on active learning and scientific process. In this paper, we describe some educational experiences on the use of research articles in chemistry higher education. Additionally, we present our own conclusions on the use of such methodology applied to a scientific communication course offered to undergraduate chemistry students at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Este trabalho descreve o uso de artigos científicos em um curso de Comunicação Científica oferecido a alunos de graduação em Química. O principal objetivo da atividade foi desenvolver as habilidades de leitura e interpretação deste tipo de texto por parte dos alunos. A atividade proporcionou aos mesmos a expressão de uma grande quantidade de idéias, resultantes das suas reflexões sobre os conteúdos presentes nos artigos, e foi analisada com base na Análise de Discurso, na linha francesa.

This work describes the use of scientific articles in a scientific communication course for undergraduate chemistry students. The main goal was to develop students' interpretative abilities of this kind of material. The activity was analyzed based on French Discourse Analysis. It was concluded that the assignment enabled the students to express a great number of ideas resulting from their reflection on the texts.

This paper describes the use of primary chemistry literature in a fifth-semester physical chemistry course for undergraduate chemistry students. The main goal is to expose students to the primary literature of physical chemistry, demonstrating how they can benefit from using it. The assignment addresses issues in chemical education such as scientific writing, relating lecture material to the real world, and conducting literature searches. The student evaluation of this assignment, consisting of two surveys and one focus group, showed its usefulness. The details of the evaluation instruments and their results are provided. Out of 45 students enrolled in the course, 30 (67%) students completed the assignment.