Outcomes
Apply critical thinking skills to evaluate the validity of discussions of science in politics and in the media.
Identify credible scientific sources.
Research the scientific basis of contemporary issues using a variety of resources, both electronic and traditional.
Read the article, taking notes or highlighting to suit your needs.
Write a paper analyzing your article. Write this as a guide to the article. It should be in the form of a bulleted list or something similar. It’s not a full essay. In the guide, you should do the following:
Evaluate the source. Not all peer-reviewed material is reliable. Predatory journals and just poor work by reviewers can lead to problems with these articles. Research your source and confirm that it is a reputable journal. In your guide, give 1 or 2 bits of evidence that it is or isn’t. Also research the authors and find out whether they are qualified to write this paper, whether they are the actual researcher, and so on. Again, include a couple points on your guide. Some websites to help you with this:
Evaluating Information Sources: What Is A Peer-Reviewed Article?
Nature
Beall’s list of predatory journals and publishers
Directory of open access journals
State the question being asked and the hypothesis being proposed. What are the scientists trying to figure out?
List any assumptions and evaluate their validity. Note that the hypothesis is not an assumption. Assumptions are not things you test, they’re things you already believe to be true. If there’s solid scientific evidence already backing up an idea, it’s not an assumption. You may not be able to find anything for this point but look closely.
Describe the research methods and materials.
Describe the research results and evidence collected.
State the conclusion the authors come to. This should be brief and decisive in your guide. What did they come up with?
Discuss whether the results support the conclusion. Does the evidence given in the paper support the claim the authors are making? Is there some other questions you’d like answered, or did they cover all the possibilities? Is there some other conclusion that a reasonable person might come to based on this experiment?
Discuss possible errors. Do not include “human error,” or “tools that didn’t work,” or “math errors.” These things can happen, and everybody knows that, but it’s not what you mention in error analysis. Look for things built into the method or data that might skew the results.
Discuss the importance of the research to society and the connection to what we’re covering in class.
Include a citation for your article and for any other source you used.
You will need to keep all the above fairly brief, so the idea is to analyze the article for key points and main ideas rather than just including all the information in your guide. Don’t summarize; analyze. Pick out what matters. Try to keep your guide under a page or so in length. A bullet list is acceptable here. This doesn’t need to be an essay.
