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Instructions
In your Week 1 Learning Resources, you will find a paper by Alwin (2012) that discusses life course concepts. This paper was published in a well-known academic journal in gerontology and addresses a key concept in the field.
Gerontologists and other social scientists draw heavily from the work published in peer-reviewed academic journals to support and generate ideas about aging research. They can be challenging to read and comprehend because they are written for scholars; they often contain jargon and citations that break up the sentences and make them difficult to follow. Some papers include complicated data analysis and results sections that are incomprehensible if you don’t have a background in research methods or statistics.
This activity will help you practice reading and understanding scholarly articles, a skill that will come in handy in courses that require you to conduct independent literature reviews on special topics.
For this activity, read the Alwin article using the following steps:
First, skim the article to determine the main point(s) and get a sense of what the article is all about. The best places to look for this are the Abstract, Introduction, and Conclusion sections.
Next, read the article more closely. After each paragraph, ask yourself, “How would I summarize what I just read?” Be an active reader by taking notes, making comments, and asking questions as you read. You can do this on your computer using electronic tools (highlighter, comments), or you can print out the article and use an actual highlighter and writing utensils.
Finally, review your notes and write an annotation—a brief 100-200 word summary of the entire article.
For this assignment, demonstrate your active reading skills by posting your annotation and a screenshot of your marked-up article or notes.
