Biology education, like education in any other discipline, strives to make students familiar with the knowledge, activities, and ways of thinking of the community of biologists. We produced a curriculum in developmental biology based on learning through primary literature, in an attempt to develop biological literacy among highschool students. Here we characterize the way in which two high-school biology students read a research article in developmental biology. Mere reading resulted in superficial comprehension. In contrast, when the students answered questions about the text, deeper comprehension evolved. The students could overcome readingcomprehension problems by applying well-established reading strategies, but encountered difficulties resulting from the classical structure of research articles. We hope that our characterization of the learning process of research articles by high-school students will enable the use of these complex texts in high-school biology classrooms.