Philosophy 130: Intro to Critical Thinking
Research Update Assignment
1. Continue the process of researching on your topic of choice. (You may decide to change topics after this research update – feel free to explore several topics during this month, to see what most interests you. You’ll decide for good on February 27.)
2. That means that you’ll be trying various avenues to find the answers to your basic questions about the topic, so that you can evaluate arguments and issues from a position of knowledge later, when you move on to more complex aspects of the topic.
3. As you research, you’ll be finding a bunch of sources. Read the summaries of each source to determine whether it will be helpful, and then skim through the sources you’ve marked to make sure they’ll be helpful. Once you’ve found several sources that look like they’ll help you gain a good, basic understanding of your topic, stop searching and start reading each source.
4. For each source, be sure that you
a. Carefully fill in the citation information in Noodle Tools, before you do anything else
b. Next to each citation summary, click on “notes.” That will open up a notecard for that source. You can open several notecards and organize them by topic if the source looks like it will contain a lot of helpful information.
c. Record everything helpful you learn from that source. You don’t want merely to note what the source contains, generally – you want to learn information from it, and to write that information down. Copy and paste all the helpful information you find from that source onto the notecard (or onto the appropriate notecard, if you’re using several for that source). You can also paraphrase each quote if you’d like, although I wouldn’t concentrate on that at this point.
d. At the bottom of each notecard, record your own thoughts and questions. If a source makes an interesting claim, you might want to make a note to yourself to research that claim further. You should also note down questions that are raised as you read the source.
5. Basically, I want to be able to see what you’re learning as you go. I can make comments on your work, so I can give you feedback about possible angles to try, questions to ask, or sources you might look into.
6. You’ll then go into your dashboard and share your project with me. Type “philosophy130-Boyle” in the text box that pops up when you click to share the project.
7. Let me know if you have any questions.
