Part One: Read and Annotate Sources
Revisit your group’s shared bibliography document (via Collaborations and group Files; instruction to access at this assignment) to find 4-6 articles that you believe will collectively provide the readers of your paper with relevant, useful background about your topic and help to answer the research question for your project group’s topic. (Four sources is the minimum, but many students find that including more sources helps you get a fuller picture of the topic and feel more confident in your writing. I don’t expect more than 6 although there is no penalty for using more.)
You should only use sources from your group’s collaborative bibliography for this assignment.
Take note of the year of publication of your sources. There is not a limit on using older sources, but you should think critically about the date; for instance, societal changes in the past 50 years could mean that a source about recycling in the 1970s won’t be exactly applicable to behaviors today.
Read your sources. Scholarly journal articles are written for an audience of other experts in the field, and they can be challenging. Take your time, make notes (see below), and don’t worry if there are complex statistical results that you don’t fully understand. Look for the question the authors wanted to answer, the methods that they used, and what results they found/how they interpret or discuss those results. You may want to jump around, skim certain sections, and mark up others. The following resources might be helpful:
How to Read a Scholarly ArticleLinks to an external site.
How to Read a Journal Article in 10 Minutes or Less (12 min video)Links to an external site. <– this is a good start but for our purposes you will want a sense of the methods, and it will probably take more than 10 minutes to write your notes
Annotate 4-6 articles (at least 10 notes per article) by writing directly on a printed copy (if you prefer) or adding notes to the PDF digitally. You can make annotations digitally in whichever program you use to view PDFs (such as Adobe Reader). If you save a PDF to Google Drive, you can add comments and make a shareable link to the file. Some students have also used the free Kami extensionLinks to an external site. for Google Chrome browser. On each article, I expect to see at least 10 annotations. These can be as simple as highlighting an important piece of evidence and noting "important evidence," or more detailed. Here are some suggestions for types of annotations, but you don't need to follow these exactly:
Highlight one or more sentences where the authors state an important point or argument that they want to make. Include a note explaining or commenting on this point in your own words. (Hint: If the author is stating their own point, the sentences probably won't include a citation of another work, otherwise they are likely explaining someone else's ideas.)
Highlight a piece of data or information that came from the authors' original research. Include a note explaining why this piece of information matters to the authors' argument and/or to what you want to write about in your paper. (Hint: This kind of information might appear in a "results" section; it could also appear in a "discussion" section, where there might be further interpretation of its significance.)
Highlight a sentence or two that connect with a concept or example from this class. Explain the connection in your note.
Highlight a statement that supports or conflicts with what you have read in another article. Explain the relationship in your note.
Highlight a word or phrase that you don't know, but which seems important, and comment explaining what you learned by looking it up.
Part Two: Summarize with Citations
List the complete APA style references for the 4-6 articles you plan to use in your paper.
Under each reference, write several sentences that summarize the content of the article, incorporating APA style in-text citations:
Write 1-2+ complete sentences paraphrasing* in your own words the methods of the study
According to Sampson et al. (2024), introduce this statement with an APA style narrative citation.
Write 1-2+ complete sentences paraphrasing in your own words the main results of the study (Note: This is often under a heading titled Results or Findings; the results will also be summarized briefly in the abstract and discussed in the final sections of the article.)
Write 1-2+ complete sentences paraphrasing in your own words the authors’ interpretations/conclusions based on those results (i.e., what do the authors think is important about their results, or how did those results answer their research question?)
End this statement with a an APA style parenthetical citation (Sampson et al., 2024).
For this assignment, all of these sentences need to be written in your own words (not quoting/copying the words of the original author or copying other students' words from the shared bibliography). Copying text directly from the original source or another student or from an AI chatbot is a form of plagiarism and will result in a 0 on this assignment.
Your summaries may be written in simpler and more direct language than the original sources. That is ok; in fact, it is often a good thing because the process of putting complex text into your own words helps you understand it.
If you absolutely need to include some of the author's exact words to get a point across, you can quote a short phrase within your sentence. (If you do include a direct quote, be sure to indicate it with quotation marks, and your citation must also have a page number).
An appropriate use of AI tools could be asking ChatGPT or similar to explain the content of a complex scholarly article in a simpler or different way, reading and absorbing that, looking back at the original text, and then explaining the content in your own words for this assignment. An inappropriate use of AI tools would be copying AI generated text into this assignment and presenting it as your own writing and understanding of the material. See "Academic Honesty" below for more information.
See Paraphrase, Summary, and Quotation (info + quiz)
