Scholarly (academic) sources.

 

Step 1: Your Post

Your submission for this step is worth 5 points.

Instructions

During Week 4 you took the , which introduced you to scholarly (academic) sources and to how they differ from popular sources. You also learned what “peer-review” means and what the peer review process entails.

For this assignment, you will be discussing summaries of scholarly (academic) sources.

To do so, you will be choosing a summary from a website called Discoveries, which is an online source of summaries of new sociological research that has been published in academic journals. The summaries are written by the graduate editorial board of , which is an “open-access social science project headquartered in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.” You can read more about The Society Pages at thesocietypages.org.

Do the following…

First, go to . 

Then, you can either scroll down through the page that appears and move through subsequent pages by clicking on the page numbers at the bottom, or you can click on the dropdown menu under “Categories” to select a category you are interested in. This will take you to all the summaries that are related to that topic.

Please see the image below so that you are sure to go to the correct drop down menu — this image shows a red arrow labeled “CLICK HERE,” showing you where the correct drop down menu is (make sure you do not click on the search box that I’ve labeled “NOT here”). 

Then, select a summary you would like to focus on for this assignment. Once you have chosen the summary, be sure to click on the title of the summary so that you are able to read it entirely and so that you have the link to that specific article. 

Then read the summary and answer the following questions about it:

Questions:

Scroll down to click the “Reply” button. You will then see a text box, where you will write your answers to the following questions. After you have finished typing your answers, click “Post Reply” (the blue box on the bottom right corner of the text box). If you need more help on how to reply to these questions on a discussion board, . After you have posted your answers to the following questions, you will see your classmates’ answers. You are then ready to do Step 2 below.

Please provide your answers to the following questions in numbered/lettered format as the questions are indicated.

What is the title and and names of the author(s) of the summary? 

Copy and paste the link of the summary. NOTE: to get the link, you need to first click on the title of the summary itself.

Describe why you selected this summary. What interests you about it?

What is the title of the scholarly article that is being summarized and what year was it published? This information should be provided under the title of the summary and above the picture. For example, in the image I posted above, the title of the scholarly article is “Noncitizen Justice: The Criminal Case Processing of Non-US Citizens in Texas and California” and the authors are Michael T. Light, Jason P Robey and Jungmyung Kim. 

Re-read the introduction paragraph of the summary. Did you find it engaging? Why or why not? How do you think the author tried to engage you as a reader?  

Now re-read the rest of the summary. What was the research question of scholarly article that is being summarized? In other words, what did the authors of the scholarly article being summarized want to find out with their study?

What research methods did the authors of the scholarly article being summarized use for their study? How is this related to what you read or watched this week in either the  or the additional content I posted ( and ). Be sure to cite/indicate which source you are getting the information from. 

What were the findings of the study in the scholarly article being summarized? 

Why should we care about these findings? 

In at least 3 sentences, tell us your thoughts or feelings about this summary. 

Step 2: Respond to Your Classmates

This step is worth 5 points.

Circle back to this discussion board and read through your classmates’ answers to Step 1. 

RESPOND TO AT LEAST 2 OF YOUR CLASSMATES BY DOING THE FOLLOWING:

Respond to classmates that do not already have a lot of responses.

Do the following in your response to your classmates:

Validate your classmate’s reasons for selecting this summary and/or their thoughts and feelings about the summary.

What is one thing you learned from reading your classmate’s summary?