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Guidelines on Abstracts Guidelines on Critical Comments
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BLS 443 and BPOLST 593 EDUCATION
POLICY AND THE ECONOMY | |||||
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Assignments and Grading:
1. Collaborative Research Project: Students will be expected to participate in a collaborative research project on an aspect of education policy. To the extent possible, these projects will have a field based component such that there will be at least one resource person at a project related school or work place. Your group may choose to demonstrate their research either with a single group paper or separate individual research papers related to the central topic. In either event, however, the group should be prepared to present findings to the class in an integrated manner. Guidelines for projects and interim due dates to be developed in class. Student initiated projects are acceptable. For the moment however, suggested projects include the following:
2. Synthesize your studies by designing your own school. This takehome exam requires you to review the class readings and work and to make explicit your understanding of the purpose(s) of education and how those purposes are best achieved. As such, this three to four page typewritten paper requires that you define desirable outcomes of education (either at the secondary or post-secondary level) and identify "best" practices consonant with those purposes. You must consider the economic impact of your choices. or) For BPOLST 593 students and for students intending to take the Winter Senior Seminar in Labor and Education. Draft a research proposal exploring more closely an issue or project related to education and the workforce. The proposal should include a review of the relevant literature, a clearly stated research question, a methodology for resolving issues related to that question and a bibliography. 3. Seminars and abstracts. On most class days two or more seminar groups will be defined in which two students prepare to lead a discussion of one of the readings. Students leading discussions should post a two-page critical comment to their seminar members via e-mail at least two-days before the class. Students not leading the seminar will have a choice of abstracting the reading or of bringing in one or two typewritten questions related to the reading (over the course each student should complete at least four 100-150 word abstracts). Guidelines for critical commentary and abstracting are posted below. In addition to instructor grading of revised seminar papers and abstracts, students will evaluate themselves and others for seminar grades. Guidelines on Abstracts with examples: Abstracts are condensations of a specific work. The aim is to provide a concise statement that accurately reflects the piece abstracted. The opening sentence Should capture the theme or thesis of the work. Either in this sentence of the one following the abstract should indicate how the author establishes his or her theme or thesis. Finally, the abstract should tersely summarizes the major points of evidence, the lines of argument, or key ideas in the work. No summary is necessary. Example 1: "Earnings of college graduates: Women compared with men." Daniel E Hecker;Monthly Labor Review; Washington; Mar 1998; : Abstract [147 words]. A 1993 National Science Foundation survey is used to examine the differences between the earnings of men and women college graduates in order to answer the question: How much do women earn compared with men? The short answer to this question is that there are many answers to it: in some fields of study and occupations, women do particularly well in relation to men, in others they do not fare so well, and in still others they are in between. While overall women with bachelor's degrees aged 25-34 earned 83% of men in the same field of study ($29,660 versus 35, 694), some fields like foreign languages were very close--women earned 101% of men in this field--others, like history showed much more substantial difference. Differences became greater with age, as the percentage of men's wages earned by BA earning women aged 35-44 fell to 74%. Example 2: "Transformation of Industrial Apprenticeship in the United States," Daniel Jacoby, Journal of Economic History, 51:4 p. 887-910 (Dec. 1991). Abstract[146 words] Jacoby uses human capital and agency theory it demonstrate that the solution to the turnover problems said to account for apprenticeship's decline increased risks that employers would shirk on their responsibility for training apprentices. Jacoby analyses three episodes in Seattle schooling and apprenticeship between 1880 and 1940 to show how apprenticeship was transformed from an employer dominated institution to a rule-based institution supported by organized labor. An early twentieth century employer-dominated contract illustrates how deferred wages protected employer investments in training, but also established an employer's unilateral control over its trainees in objectionable ways. Second, Washington State's 1913 minimum wage law established sub-minimum apprenticeships to minimize employer abuse of training wages. By the 1930s, the state had worked out explicit apprenticeship contracts for all workers that attempted to balance employer power by including unions in joint-apprenticeship committees that regulated and defined conditions of hire and discharge.
Guidelines on Critical Comments There are many ways to write a critical commentary. The guiding idea in writing a critical commentary is first and foremost to closely examine an author's assumptions, ideas, evidence and/or argument. In doing so, your comment may either affirm or reject the author's work. A crticial comment need not address the entire work of an author, but may focus on one or more significant portions of it. In discussing the author's work, it is necessary to accurately provide the reader with enough of the author's position to be able to understand your discussion of their work. Ways of opening an author's work to critical examination include, a) relating it to complementary or competing analyses (i.e., does this author extend someone else's ideas or, alternatively, is this piece contradicting another well-regarded--either by you or others--work); b) considering the assumptions implicit in the piece (for example, if one were discussing a piece on meritocracy one might question the implicit assumptions about merit--is it measureable, does it depend upon moral values?). Would the work be regarded differently if these implicit assumptions were made explicitly; c) examining the logic of an argument also permits a critical understanding of a work (e.g. if an author is arguing that testing will produce higher performance, does the author have an explicit model from which this theory can be logically derived--and therefore, also falsified by experimental technique); d) finally, scrutinizing evidence often leads one to consider whether the claims made on behalf on the evidence are too broad, or even if they are warranted at all. In short, when producing a critical comment, your objective should be to think clearly, to be fair, and to question what you are being told. You do not need to be negative, though you certainly may criticize an author if you think the work has weaknesses. Most arguments have some weakness, but that does not necessarily mean that a study or work has no merit. On occassion, however, it does. |
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