Today’s Plan:
- A few heuristics
- Summarize an article
- Homework
A Few Heuristics for Researching an Article
For today’s class, I asked you to bring a copy of one research article you planned on using in your paper. By the end of class today, I will ask you to read that article and write a 300-400 word summary of it. Learning to read complex research in a short amount of time is a hard skill, but it is important to learn how to read it strategically. Likewise, it can be quite difficult to condense a 20-page article into a few paragraphs, and certainly the I have collected a few readings that should help us do this.
- Paul Gillin’s “How to Read and Summarize a 20-Page Research Report in 20 Minutes”
- Wikihow’s “How to Summarize a Journal Article”
- Drew Loewe, “Demystifying Academic Writing”
From these, we can synthesize a few general rules:
- Begin by reading the abstract and the conclusion. Have an overall sense of the argument
- Highlight and annotate as you go. Look for key words that indicate findings. Try to identify what problem the article hopes to address
- Especially when working with research, make note of the methodology. Was it a survey? An experiment? Was it qualitative research (textual analysis), or more quantitative (measurement)?
- When working with scholarship, pay attention to the theorists or scholars the author uses to support her argument.
- In or near the conclusion, look for where the writer(s) advocate(s) for us to do something differently; what does she perceive as the impact of this research?
Use these heuristics above to read and summarize one article that will inform your final paper. Then, convert this summary into a blog post.
Useful Research
While going through the proposals, I am trying to keep a list of the articles that I find. These might be useful for others!
- National Center for Educational Statistics, rise in tuition costs by decade
- RadioOpenSource, Where Does All that Money Go?
- Bound et al., “Understanding the Decrease in College Completion Rates and theIncreased Time to the Baccalaureate Degree”
- Chronicle of Higher Education College Completion, graduation rates by state and institution type</li>
Homework
For homework, read, summarize, and blog one additional article.
In Thursday’s class, we will work with direct quotation and incorporating block quotes into your paper. Bring one of the books from the second stage of our class with you (either Nathan, Arum and Roksa, Giroux, or Nussbaum).
