BIS 300A

Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Winter 2010

David S. Goldstein, Ph.D.

Article Abstract Assignment

due in Blackboard Group Pages Discussion Board at 10:45 a.m. sharp on Wednesday, Feb. 10

The purpose of this assignment is to practice the important skills of reading and summarizing scholarly articles and to help you and your cluster members learn about your chosen topic. It is meant to address the following learning goals for the course:

• Understand and appreciate the interdisciplinary production of knowledge and the ways in which it underwrites different aspects of the IAS Program;
• Gain a critical understanding of the IAS Program's diverse and interrelated (inter)disciplinary fields and methods of inquiry;
• Become better critical thinkers and writers, capable of posing, answering, and reposing a variety of complex questions;
• Become better researchers, able to use the resources at UWB and elsewhere in order to identify existing and complementary scholarly work while producing original knowledge through data gathering and interpretation.
  

Each member of your research cluster will post one article abstract. To do that, follow these steps:

• First, select the one scholarly article you have found in a peer-reviewed journal that you think would be of most interest to your cluster members. (If you are unsure how to identify a scholarly article, read the Campus Library's guide at http://library.uwb.edu/guides/sources.html. It is o.k. if more than one group member chooses the same article to abstract.  Check Ulrich's Periodicals Directory to make sure your journal is peer-reviewed.  Note that not everything in a peer-reviewed journal is necessarily a research article.  Some journals include book reviews, editorials, and other non-article content which cannot be used for this assignment.  In other words, use your skills to determine whether your chosen article is from a peer-reviewed journal and is an original research article .  Consult a librarian or me if you have any questions about a source you want to use.
• If your article includes its own abstract, or you have found an abstract of your article somewhere else, I strongly recommend that you do not read it!  It is difficult not to be influenced by an abstract written by someone else, and it makes it harder to produce your own based only on your own critical reading and thinking.  Moreover, you run the risk of using too much of the original abstract, either intentionally or unintentionally, which can lead to academic integrity problems.  It is important to avoid the appearance of using someone else's intellectual property without attribution.
• Then, read "Writing Abstracts" at http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/bizwrite/abstracts.html.
• Then, write an informative abstract of 200 to 300 words, following the "Writing Abstracts" guide. Please write your document in Microsoft Word.  Although the "Writing Abstracts" web site example is single-spaced and does not contain full publication information, please make sure that your abstract is double-spaced and contains, anywhere in the document, the article's full publication information: full title, author, journal title, and publication date, and full information about the database from which it was retrieved, if any (e.g., ProQuest. Retrieved 13 Jan. 2010.).  Please use a standard academic header as shown in item #20 in "Tips for Better Prose" at http://faculty.washington.edu/davidgs/Prose.html (which does not count toward the word count).
• Name your Word file Lastname300Abstract (with your own last name, with identical capitalization and no spaces), like this:

Mahone300Abstract

• Finally, no later than 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 10, post your abstract in Blackboard. To do so, log onto Blackboard and click on "Communication," then on "Group Pages."  Click on your research cluster link, and then on "Discussion Board."  Then click on the "Article Abstracts" link and then on my message. Click on the "Reply" button and attach your abstract, which must be a Word document, to your message.
  

Your abstract will be graded on the following criteria:

This page last updated January 25, 2010.

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