1) find the 12 components of a Research Essay, and create a Word document with these headlines. Email it to yourself.
2) download the 3 sample essays from last semester, and email them to yourself.
3) read 1 of the 3 sample essays together in class, and look at the corresponding survey and report sheet to see how the student from last semester has integrated his/her data. HOMEWORK for Wednesday, Oct. 22: Read the other two, so you get a good idea of what you are expected to do!
4) Find 3 research articles (or 4, for the 400 level) that deal with your topic and contain information you want to either confirm or contradict with your own survey results. NOTE: You are ONLY allowed to use published research essays from JSTOR, ERIC, or Google Scholar. No others are accepted; especially not websites and Wikipedia (those are not scientific and can contain many errors).
5) Create an Annotated Bibliography of these 3 or 4 articles.
HOMEWORK for Wednesday, Oct. 22: Email me ONE entry for your Annotated Bibliography.
HOMEWORK for Friday, Oct. 24th: Email me the TWO (or three) other entries for your Annotated Bibliography.
When I have graded and approved your entries for your Annotated Bibliography, copy and paste them into your Word document that is going to be your research essay under the corresponding heading.
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A research essay has 12 main components which are easy to detect: look at the headlines!
TASK 1:
Take 5 min. to briefly look over the following three sample research essays from the Internet (all are a little different, but their main components are always the same), and let's find out in class discussion what the components are (in the right order!!!).
1. article: Genetic Determinants of Bone Mass in Adults
2. article: Exploring the Role of Distance Education....
3. article: about Decision Making Styles
Tell me the components, so I can put them on the blog. You are going to open a Word document, and type those 12 headings in there. This is the beginning of your research essay. Save it on your desktop, and email it to yourself, so you always have access to it, since we are going to work on it in class during the following four weeks.
12 components of Research Essay:
1. title
2. your name + institution
3. abstract (goes in between two black lines)
4. keywords (under the lower black line)
5. introduction (contains status quo of your topic, and debate about your topic)
6. literature review (a review of 3 research articles you've read about your topic)
7. purpose (of your research)
8. participants
9. methods (online survey created by www.surveymonkey.com; emailed out)
10. results (your 3 xls graphs)
11 (a). discussion (or: conclusion)
11 (b). limitations (this point is voluntary; here, you can discuss the validity of your research, for example that it would have shed a better light on the topic if you had interviewed more than 20 people, or people outside Illinois, or other limitations)
12. Annotated Bibliography (normally: references; but we do a bit more than that)
As 13., you are going to attach your annex (pdf file of your SurveyMonkey result sheet. If you had open-ended text box questions on your survey, you need to attach the separate Word doc. sheets for the text answers of your subjects, too, since those won't print on your pdf report sheet. You have to click on VIEW on your SurveyMonkey results page, and print them out separately for each question where you had an open-ended text box!)
TASK 2:
Go to the website linked below, and save the three sample essays on your desktop as Word documents. Email them to yourself, so you will always have access to them. They show what last semester's students have done with their survey - they've created a research essay using their own data pool, creating graphs from their results using their SurveyMonkey Report Sheet, and integrating current research about their topic in their literature review, analyzing it in their Annotated Bibliography. The latter will be done in APA format. Use this link to see what your Annotated Bibliography has to look like.
NOTE: If you take this course at a 300 level, you need 3 published and peer-reviewed research essay from scientific journals for your Annotated Bibliography.
If you take this course at a 400 level, you need 5 published and peer-reviewed research essays from scientific journals for your Annotated Bibliography.
NOTE: While all three essays were A's, the students have made some minor mistakes, for example with citing correctly in the text in APA style, or regarding the academic format, etc. Do not take over uncritically everything they did, but use their papers as examples only.
Here are three sample Research Essays that some of my ENGL300 students wrote this Spring.
The first one deals with autism (Report Sheet included). Here's the corresponding survey.
The second one deals with AAE (Report Sheet included). Here's the corresponding survey.
The third one deals with Twins. (Report Sheet included.) Here's the corresponding survey.
In-Class Task:
Browse the Internet for 3 (respectively, 4) research articles about your topic. Use the links on top of this blog to search in the ERIC and JSTOR databases, and Google Scholar. No unscientific essays, please!!!
When you've found a title that sounds like it might be usable for your paper, read over it; and if you find good quotations you want to use (either confirming or contradicting what you want to find out with your own survey), create an Annotated Bibliography entry for it, and type it into your Word document. Your homework for Wednesday is to email me one annotation. An annotation in APA consists of the citation line, a very brief and concise summary of 2-3 sentences, and a personal statement of 2-3 sentences. See example of an annotation as linked at the top of this blog. See also this example I wrote for another class:
Hudson, R. F., Lane, H. B., & Pullen, P.C. (2005). Reading fluency assessment and instruction: What, why, and how? The reading teacher, 58 (8), 702-714.
After defining fluency as accurate oral rendering of connected text at conversational rate with suitable prosody, and its importance with regard to the automaticity needed for textual comprehension, Hudson et al. explain different correlations, such as between reading accuracy and proficiency, reading rate and reading proficiency, and prosody and reading proficiency. They provide research-based information on the assessment of reading fluency and accuracy, explaining different measuring instruments for contextual oral reading, e.g. time readings, AIMSweb, DIBELS, GORT-4, NEEP, Reading Fluency Monitor, as well as observations and Zutell & Rasinski’s scale for prosody. Finally, they list evidence-based instructional fluency-development methods, such as (timed) repeated readings, and connected programs (Carbo Recorded Books, Great Leaps Reading, etc.), and answer some common instructional questions.
As a future reading specialist, I want to get to know as many fluency-development methods and forms of assessment as possible (including the “fads”), to find out which practices work best in my classrooms or tutoring sessions, always keeping in mind that a fast reading pace is NOT always a signal for textual comprehension: some children are good at sounding out words fast and show phonemic awareness without understanding what they read, because they are “glued to the print” focusing on the letters instead of prior knowledge, content, context, and inferences. Those children are also in danger of not being able to “read between the lines” and understand what is not explicit, for example humor / sarcasm / irony. To detect the problems of such students (which often go unnoticed due to said fluency) is a major challenge for reading teachers.
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