Lindsey McLean

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Assignments Contributed

This assignment was designed to incorporate information literacy concepts into an in depth writing assignment. By only focusing on a total of one outside source at a time, students are required to do deep research to find the one source that they can engage with on the level required for a good essay. Requiring a small number of sources also allows the students to practice incorporating outside material into their own writing and thinking and allows the instructor to see progress in this area.

Exercise One:

In this sequence of activities, students will learn how to identify scholarly sources using three pronged test: 1) Is the source written by a researcher or academic 2) Is the source published in a scholarly book or peer reviewed journal, and 3) Does the source have an extensive bibliography. They will then be asked to find one scholarly book and one scholarly article on a general topic.

Learning Activities

Scholarly source pre-test

The primary purpose of a literature review is to provide a rationale for your proposed research question(s). You need to locate your research question within the broader conversation of a particular discipline. A review of literature should present a synthesis of existing theory and research literature that argues for the usefulness of the research question.

Assignments Collaborated

This assignment is designed to help students develop a thoughtful research topic. Students go through a series of steps, questions, and background reading to help them better understand and refine a research topic.

Assignments Adapted

We do similar activities in library instruction sessions, using either google forms or google spreadsheets. In one of the freshman courses we teach we adapt this activity where, instead of using the student's own research topics, we have them work in groups and complete an information seeking task that we assign to the group. For example, one group has to find a magazine article about student debt, while another group has to find a book, and yet another has to find a peer reviewed journal article. Here is a link to the Google Form they fill out as they complete the task http://libguides.lmu.edu/RHET1000/task. Once all of the groups finish we can pull up the spreadsheet of responses and talk about the strategies used to find the different types of information.

Contributor Stats

Writing, Analysis, and Disciplinary Discourse
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Identify and Find Scholarly Sources
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Literature Review
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1,662 6 0