Transcript Composition ii - Cecelia Munzenmaier: Online Portfolio

The Research Process
An Introduction
Remember the writing process?
It’s recursive
Plan
Get ideas
Draft
Get them on paper
Revise
Make them better
Publish
Share with others
Research can be Billy trail
Goal
Billy’s path
Family Circus
Kuhlthau’s Model of Research
Stage
Initiation
Selection
Exploration
Formulation
Collection
Presentation
Task
what do I do?
what’s my topic?
what’s out there?
what do I think?
what will I use?
how will I share
what I learn?
Feelings
uncertainty
optimism
confusion
clarity
confidence
satisfaction
(or not)
Research: They Say + I Say
They Say:
Professional Literature
I say:
Thesis
Research: Conversation
A research paper is a record of
intelligent reading in several
sources on a particular subject.
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Which is best?
Can these ideas be combined?
Why do things
happen this way?
How could things
be made better?
Who cares what they know?
In academic writing, your opinion is only as
good as your evidence.
Personal Experience
Community of Experts
Parents: Home movies
Doctors detected signs
show no autism symptoms of autism in the movies.
before vaccination
Schwetter: These
dinosaur bones smell.
Huh? DNA was
recovered.
Who cares what they know?
In academic writing, your opinion is only as
good as your evidence.
Advantages
of Personal Opinion
Limits
of Personal Opinion
Anecdotal evidence is not enough.
Why read what they know?
You’ll be up-to-date.
“Ninety percent of what we know about Alzheimer’s
has been discovered in the last 15 years.”
(A. Riesenberg, as cited in “Health Questions,” 2007)
Why read what they know?
You’ll have a complete picture.
“An estimated 5 to 15 percent of people with
anorexia or bulimia are male.”
(National Institutes of Mental Health, 2007)
Why read what they know?
You may be surprised.
Does Prison Harden Inmates?
Chen and Shapiro’s 2003 findings “cast grave doubt on at
least one model of deterrence, which holds that a few years
of grim prison conditions will spook criminals back onto the
straight and narrow. Whatever the deterrent effects of hard
prison conditions, the authors conclude, they may often be
outweighted by the increased criminal propensities of the
prisoners subject to them” (p. 33).
Why read what they know?
You need to be well-informed to be credible.
“Lancaster, England,…is arguably the capital of survivor
studies. This is where John Leach teaches and writes papers
cited in almost every important study of survival” (Sherwood,
2009, p. 45)
How do you find experts?
They cite sources.
They are cited as sources.
They are described as
experts
• pioneers
• founder of the field of….
•
Their writings are found in the scholarly literature:
EBSCO
• Scholar Google
• FindArticles.com
•
Can you trust Paula Begoun?
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Check out www.cosmeticscop.com
What are her sources?
Two ingredients almost universally added
to cosmetics, fragrance and preservatives
are often thought to be the major culprits
when our skin has an allergic or
sensitizing reaction to a cosmetic (Source:
Contact Dermatitis, June 1999, pages
310–315).
Who is Hans Selye?
Credibility = Quality sources
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Professional literature
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Respected sources
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Harvard Business Review
National Institutes of Health
Expert opinion
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Peer-reviewed journals
Professional associations
Professional training
Reputation
Seminal thinkers
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H. Gardner—multiple intelligences
M. Seligman—happiness, learned helplessness
J. M. Burns—leadership
Gosling—animal psychologoy
“Alpha roosters”
Groopman
How Doctors Think (2007)
Popular or scholarly?
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Google
Staley pertype
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Go to “Is It a Magazine or a Journal?”
www.millikin.edu/staley/research/pertype.asp
Conversation: Assignments
T
H
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Y
S
A
Y
I
S
A
Y
Explore professional literature.
Form a tentative thesis.
Find evidence to support your
thesis.
Refine your thesis.
Write your paper.
Other sites to check out
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Save the Pacific Tree Octopus
zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.html
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Primate Programming
www.newtechusa.com/ppi/main.asp
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British Stick Insect Foundation
http://www.brookview.karoo.net/Stick_Insects/
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Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division
http://www.dhmo.org/
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Museum of Hoaxes
www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoaxsites.html
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Snopes.com
www.snopes.com
I say
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“Those who attend class 95% of the
time are significantly more likely to
earn an A or B grade.”
Any bias there?
They say
in-text citation
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A study by Snell and Meikes (1995), found
that “those who attended class 95% of the
time were significantly more likely to earn
an A or B grade.”
reference list entry
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Snell, J., & Meikes, S. (1995). Student attendance and academic
achievement: A research note. Journal of Instructional
Psychology 22(2). Retrieved April 12, 2004, from Academic
Search Elite database.
I say: CSI
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Real-life crimes are solved using
blood spatter and lots of other
reliable forensic evidence,
just like the ones on CSI.
They say: CSI
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Joseph Peterson, acting director of the Dept. of
Criminal Justice at the University of IllinoisChicago, says DNA is rarely culled from crime
scenes and analyzed.
Crime scenes today are much like they were in
the 1970s, Peterson says, when his studies
found that fingerprints and tool marks were the
most common types of evidence left at crime
scenes.
Blood was found only 5 percent of
the time, usually at murder scenes.
(Roane, 2005)
Conversation: CSI effect
Prosecutors Say:
Defenders Say:
Juries expect
too much evidence
Juries understand
our case better
I say:
Thesis
Conversation: What can I add?
• Answer a question
—Do shows like CSI affect the way jurors react
to evidence?
—Is the CSI effect good or bad?
—Is the CSI effect real?
—What is the best treatment for ADHD?
• Sort out conflicting opinions
• Suggest a new approach
• Update information
Research can be Billy trail
Goal
Billy’s path
Family Circus
A research flowchart
Then there’s serendipity…
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Look up schedule for Criminal Minds.
Find profiler quiz.
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/criminal_minds/games.shtml
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Wonder: can profilers be as fast and
accurate as Gideon’s team?
Do some reading.
Stumble over CSI effect….
How do I get started?
1. Find a topic.
2. Read about it.
3. Ask
—Can I find enough information?
—Will this hold my interest?
4. Explore other topics.
5. Choose the best.
What’s the “best” topic?
• Arguable
• Discussable
• Adds something
to the conversation
What’s a starting place?
http://word-crafter.net/CompI/
TopicExploration.html
Conversation: Ideas from Ideas
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Michael Karin discovered a link between inflammation
and cancer.
“This result, Karin notes, may explain the puzzling
observation that cutting into tumors…sometimes seems
to encourage metastasis.”
If he is correct, the inflammation generated by the
[surgery] could be at fault.
Findings by other researchers suggest that inflammation
does play a role in cancer.
(G. Stix, “A Malignant Flame,” 2002, p. 65)
Credibility = “Top rooster”
Although one should not necessarily
judge an article by where it appears,
there is a pecking order in clinical
medicine. The New England Journal of
Medicine and the Journal of the
American Medical Association
(JAMA) are the alpha roosters…
Credibility = “Top rooster”
In my own specialties, the Annals of Internal
Medicine, Blood, and the Journal of Clinical
Oncology are the most prestigious. When
researchers have rigorous, ground-breaking
data to announce, they try to publish in one of
the top-tier journals; by the same
token, these journals seek out
epochal reports to add to their luster
(Groopman, 2007, p. 215).
Know seminal authors
Anderson and Mather (1993) documented
personality in octopuses
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Same species, but
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Achilles—aggressive
Emily Dickinson—shy
Lucretia McEvil—tore tank apart
Led to new field:
animal psychology
Know key authors: animal psych
 Previously,
scientists wanted to avoid
anthropomorphism
 Gosling reframed question:
“[Behaviorists] said,‘Let's
get rid of the
fuzzy, sentimental…descriptions.’ And
they did. They went to great efforts to
record…things like how many times a
chimpanzee scratched its head.…If I
need to know whether I can go into
that cage to clean it, it's not useful
to tell me the chimp scratched its nose
50,000 times in [a] year. Just tell me, Is it aggressive or not?"