5.1 Pedagogy Project & Rationale

Purpose. To give you the opportunity to create a usable document after studying various pedagogies and to demonstrate that you can apply what you have learned. This project asks you to design and justify a pedagogical practice for a specific English Studies context.

Instructions Invention. Choose an context that you are teaching in or would want to teach in. This project will give you the opportunity to rethink your current practices and/or develop a proposal for a new instructional opportunity.

These opportunities may include:

- a professional writing, literature, or creative writing course;

- doing a workplace writing workshop;

- a WAC workshop;

- mentoring or professionalization for writing faculty;

- teaching an English studies course in an online context.

Choose what you want to focus on in this context. For example, you may decide to...

- descriptively outline the entire course or workshop;

- provide a detailed outline of a specific unit or project;

- propose a descriptive plan for mentoring or professionalization;

- include teaching tools you develop.

As you make these decisions, consider the 2500 or 4000 word, single spaced scope of the project.

You will want to develop an informed understanding of the instructional context by drawing upon the research that you did this semester. Also, if you plan to develop your pedagogical project for a specific context which is encouraged, do some field research to get a better sense of this context.

Instructions Writing Pedagogy Project. Develop a 50 word abstract that briefly explains the pedagogical situation.

Compose an 2500 or 4000 word, single-spaced description of what you will be doing for this pedagogical situation. The instructor or your peers in this class, if the situation arose, should be able to use this document to teach what you have proposed with very few questions.

The choices that you make about the context and the scope of the project will determine how you structure this document and how much detail you use. As you make these decisions, think about how you want to actually use the document that you produce beyond this course.

Instructions Writing Rationale

In addition to designing the pedagogy, you will also justify the pedagogical decisions that you have made. Therefore you will include a 750 or 1000 word rationale with your pedagogy project. In this rationale you will address. What are your instructional goals for the pedagogy you developed? What are the pedagogical issues that informed your design? What have scholars said about these issues? (use the assigned readings, the readings that you did for the blog, any other relevant scholarship that you read, and personal experiences although this support should not be used to the exclusion of engaging with the theoretical discussion). How does your pedagogy reflect your position on these issues? (point to very specific practices in your pedagogy to illustrate your point). How might the practice of the pedagogy you developed contribute to the larger conversation about English Studies pedagogy in this context? (your response to this will probably draw upon everything above; you may also choose to use your personal experiences as support, but again not to the exclusion of the theoretical support). Sources that you reference should be cited using a MLA, APA, or another appropriate citation format.

General form of a research paper

An objective of organizing a research paper is to allow people to read your work selectively. When I research a topic, I may be interested in just the methods, a specific result, the interpretation, or perhaps I just want to see a summary of the paper to determine if it is relevant to my study. To this end, many journals require the following sections, submitted in the order listed, each section to start on a new page. There are variations of course. Some journals call for a combined results and discussion, for example, or include materials and methods after the body of the paper. The well known journal Science does away with separate sections altogether, except for the abstract.

Your papers are to adhere to the form and style required for the Journal of Biological Chemistry, requirements that are shared by many journals in the life sciences.

Title Page

Select an informative title as illustrated in the examples in your writing portfolio example package. Include the name(s) and address(es) of all authors, and date submitted.

Abstract

The summary should be two hundred words or less. See the examples in the writing portfolio package.

General intent

An abstract is a concise single paragraph summary of completed work or work in progress. In a minute or less a reader can learn the rationale behind the study, general approach to the problem, pertinent results, and important conclusions or new questions.

Writing an abstract

Write your summary after the rest of the paper is completed. After all, how can you summarize something that is not yet written? Economy of words is important throughout any paper, but especially in an abstract. However, use complete sentences and do not sacrifice readability for brevity. You can keep it concise by wording sentences so that they serve more than one purpose. For example, "In order to learn the role of protein synthesis in early development of the sea urchin, newly fertilized embryos were pulse labeled, to provide a time course of changes in synthetic rate, as measured by total counts per minute." This sentence provides the overall question, methods, and type of analysis, all in one sentence. The writer can now go directly to summarizing the results.

Introduction

Your introductions should not exceed two pages (double spaced, typed).

General intent

The purpose of an introduction is to acquaint the reader with the rationale behind the work, with the intention of defending it. It places your work in a theoretical context, and enables the reader to understand and appreciate your objectives.

Writing an introduction

The abstract is the only text in a research paper to be written without using paragraphs in order to separate major points. Approaches vary widely, however for our studies the following approach can produce an effective introduction.

Describe the importance (significance) of the study why was this worth doing in the first place? Provide a broad context.

Defend the model - why did you use this particular organism or system? What are its advantages? You might comment on its suitability from a theoretical point of view as well as indicate practical reasons for using it.

Provide a rationale. State your specific hypothesis(es) or objective(s), and describe the reasoning that led you to select them.

Very briefly describe the experimental design and how it accomplished the stated objectives.

Materials and Methods

There is no specific page limit, but a key concept is to keep this section as concise as you possibly can. People will want to read this material selectively. The reader may only be interested in one formula or part of a procedure. Materials and methods may be reported under separate subheadings within this section or can be incorporated together.

General intent

This should be the easiest section to write, but many students misunderstand the purpose. The objective is to document all specialized materials and general procedures, so that another individual may use some or all of the methods in another study or judge the scientific merit of your work. It is not to be a step by step description of everything you did, nor is a methods section a set of instructions. In particular, it is not supposed to tell a story. By the way, your notebook should contain all of the information that you need for this section.

Results

The page length of this section is set by the amount and types of data to be reported.

Continue to be concise, using figures and tables, if appropriate, to present results most effectively. See recommendations for content, below.

General intent

The purpose of a results section is to present and illustrate your findings. Make this section a completely objective report of the results, and save all interpretation for the discussion.

Writing a results section

Important: you must clearly distinguish material that would normally be included in a research article from any raw data or other appendix material that would not be published. In fact, such material should not be submitted at all unless requested by the instructor.

Discussion

Journal guidelines vary. Space is so valuable in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, that authors are asked to restrict discussions to four pages or less, double spaced, typed. That works out to one printed page. While you are learning to write effectively, the limit will be extended to five typed pages. If you practice economy of words that should be plenty of space within which to say all that you need to say.

General intent

The objective here is to provide an interpretation of your results and support for all of your conclusions, using evidence from your experiment and generally accepted knowledge, if appropriate. The significance of findings should be clearly described.

Writing a discussion

Interpret your data in the discussion in appropriate depth. This means that when you explain a phenomenon you must describe mechanisms that may account for the observation. If your results differ from your expectations, explain why that may have happened. If your results agree, then describe the theory that the evidence supported. It is never appropriate to simply state that the data agreed with expectations, and let it drop at that.

Literature Cited

Please note that in the introductory laboratory course, you will not be required to properly document sources of all of your information. One reason is that your major source of information is this website, and websites are inappropriate as primary sources. Second, it is problematic to provide a hundred students with equal access to potential reference materials. You may nevertheless find outside sources, and you should cite any articles that the instructor provides or that you find for yourself.

List all literature cited in your paper, in alphabetical order, by first author.

In a proper research paper, only primary literature is used (original research articles authored by the original investigators). Be cautious about using web sites as references anyone can put just about anything on a web site, and you have no sure way of knowing if it is truth or fiction. If you are citing an on line journal, use the journal citation (name, volume, year, page numbers). Some of your papers may not require references, and if that is the case simply state that "no references were consulted."

Writing a Scientific Research Paper

Steps in Writing a High School Science Research Paper. Jared Lewis is a professor of history, philosophy and the humanities. He has taught various courses in these fields since 2001. A former licensed financial adviser, he now works as a writer and has published numerous articles on education and business. He holds a bachelor's degree in history, a master's degree in theology and has completed doctoral work in American history.

Science laboratory experiments provide students with a chance to use scientific investigation methods.

Putting together an effective research paper for a high school science class or competition requires a suitable experiment and paying proper attention to the steps of the scientific method. This will ensure that the results of the experiment are authentic and accurate. Science papers are typically experiment-based and help teach students about scientific methodology. The paper should elaborate on the experimental method in such a way that readers can repeat the experiment on their own.