Students will explore diverse sources of information and investigate how source access, selection, and organization can impact who has what information. They will produce information accessible to audiences beyond academia. The annotated bibliography assignment and the final class project–a collaboratively developed public-facing syllabus–both of which require the utilization of different types of sources and heightened attention to their targeted audiences, will also further address the issues of accessibility and power.
Students will research environmental and social issues—their history and differential impact on affected communities—and develop possible policy solutions. They will engage with information from diverse perspectives and evaluate it for authority, positionality, credibility, accuracy, and relevance. They will conduct economic analysis, and either modify an existing policy or propose a new one to address the environmental problem. Students will also share their research with elementary school students through the Connect Classroom event.
Students will explore who can produce ‘expert’ knowledge and engage with feminist epistemology and alternative ways of knowing. They will critique the limitations of traditional methodologies and how feminist research design can help address these limitations. The research proposal students develop over the course of the semester will include a knowledge review and an outline of the research design and data collection procedures. The knowledge review will situate students’ research interests in existing theoretical debates and also incorporate knowledge outside of traditional academic sources.
Students will complete a series of scaffolding assignments, including a literature review with an annotated bibliography, an analytical response paper, and paper drafts. They will identify the latest scholarship on their topic, situate their own research in theoretical debates, and organize existing scholarship into several competing groups against or on which students can build their own arguments. The culmination of their semester-long research will be their presentation at the end of the semester, during which students will assume the role of political scientists at a mock scholarly conference.
Students will uncover the influence of power and privilege on the production and circulation of knowledge about globalization. They will examine what makes a work canonical and compare and contrast whether and how the author’s position on a given tropic has changed over time. They will also look at the publishing process and how it might favor Euro-American centric views. Students will present on a topic from an underrepresented perspective, as well as reflect on the challenges to find information from non-Euro-American perspectives and the role they can play in elevating such perspectives.
Students will complete a historical research paper and practice how to intervene within a scholarly conversation or debate. They will locate primary sources, analyze the historical context in which the sources were written, and discuss the types of “voices” they have access to as historical researchers. Students will research the kinds of research questions and arguments other scholars are making about the related topic. They will consider whether their own primary sources might shed a different light on their topic or develop and refine existing arguments. Students will also reflect on their research process.
Students will conduct research on the decline narratives related to reading and literature, and trace the kinds of evidence used in these narratives. They will assess how research findings get morphed, distorted, and shaped as they are cited by scholars and the popular press. Students will documents the sources of their distractions in their attention journal. They will turn these sources into quantitative data to discover the imperfections of the data collection process. Students will also conduct a case study of the writing and research processes of top-performing Lafayette seniors from different disciplines.
Students will prepare a policy brief describing economic data series from their assigned category, analyzing how the data was interpreted in a news article they have identified, and discussing how people can interpret data differently. They will then write a short report about their data series, including the data trends, the potential impact of such change on the life of an average American, and the types of economic research questions that might arise from this trend. For their end of the semester presentation, students will assume the role of research economists, explaining and interpreting changes in data, and offering policy advice about what actions should be taken by policymakers.
Throughout the semester, students will use a thinking journal to respond to key ideas and themes in their course readings and to examine scholarly and critical arguments. In their midterm project, students will explore a local example of literary reception using the teaching materials of the late comparative literature professor Ed Brown at Lafayette. At the end of the semester, students will engage in an essay assignment for which they will write a series of hundreds, one-hundred word increments based on the semester’s readings and thinkings. They will index their peer’s writing, present their indexes, and write a short piece explaining their organizational choices.
Through the first two projects, students will examine how sexism and racism impact the reception and circulation of information about public health and chemical exposure, particularly, how ideas of gender and race were embedded in public perceptions of DDT prior to Rachel Carson and Dolores Huerta’s work. They will write a rhetorical analysis of a DDT advertisement from the 1940s and 1950s and locate and analyze reviews of or response to Silent Spring. Students will then research and assess the cleaning products used by custodial staff on the Lafayette campus, using reports from the Environmental Protection Industry, material data safety sheets, and publications on endocrine disrupting chemicals.
During the first half of the semester, students will engage in a critical reading exercise to put the texts assigned in conversation with each other. They will then analyze primary sources and complete one analysis of a primary source of their own choosing. For the annotated bibliography and historiographical essay assignments, students will identify key published works that are in conversation with the topic of their final paper and write a historiographical essay. Throughout the semester, students will keep an informal journal in which they will write about the process of doing research and writing. Their entries will serve as a starting point to discuss the research process and challenges.
Throughout the semester, students will collectively locate digital materials and create a digital archive of the alternative histories on various topics. They will identify a historical document of their own and (re)imagine its history through creative, fictional story-telling in French. The end-of-the-semester project will require students to conduct scholarly research on one particular historical theme and discuss how their historical research supports or calls into question the ways in which history is reflected in literature and/or film. Students will document their own exploration of history by keeping a personal research journal.
Students will locate films and analyze the perspective favored in the portrayal of settler colonialism. They will find present-day maps and statistics about Native American reservations in the U.S. and discuss the public availability of this information and how it challenges or reinforces views on Native American life and U.S. history. Students will research a particular global case study, build two bibliographies using two approaches, and discuss the challenges of finding indigenous perspectives. They will also find and analyze images that portray settler and indigenous perspectives.
Students will engage in a research design project with three components: an introduction, a literature review, and their proposed study. For the literature research, students will synthesize sources, look up the authors’ background, analyze similarities and/or differences among their claims and methods, and examine causes of disagreement. Students will participate in class discussions on the purpose and integration of sources and develop a better understanding of how citations are a dialogue among many voices on a given topic. Students will also write an exploratory essay in which they will trace the evolution of their thinking and projects.
Students will locate relevant research articles for class discussions that they will lead and the lab report they will produce.They will synthesize, compare and contrast the articles, with particular attention paid to the reproducibility of the studies and the ethical issues surrounding the “reproducibility crisis” in social psychology. Based on the literature review they have completed and the class discussion on study reproducibility, students will develop their research question and design their own study. They will conduct the study and present their results in a poster. Students will also engage in discussions and exercises to evaluate how researchers disseminate research findings for lay audiences and learn how to present scientific information to a non-scientific audience in clear and accessible language.
To understand how sociological, psychological, and scientific studies have shaped the popular discourse of climate anxiety students will complete a semi-formal archive mapping project in which students will trace the development of literature on climate anxiety (by topic, author’s disciplinary background, date). They will write a six-page paper on how scientific information becomes circulated and narrativized. With the help of a climate anxiety expert from Brown University, students will interview people on campus about their climate anxieties. They will then write lyrical and imaginative narratives in which the greatest fears of the participants do not come true. Accompanying this will be a critique of how they are able to link their work on information literacy on climate anxiety with narrative and lyrical writing.
Students will examine the validity of scientific theories such as the C-value paradox in light of the growing amount of genomic information. Students will start with a seminal article on the paradox from the 1980s and discuss what makes it seminal. They will find later articles that confirm and/or refute the original study, summarize and evaluate the arguments. Students will then learn how genomic data is organized and collect genomic information using credible sources. They will apply statistical tests to analyze and visualize the genomic information they have collected and present their scientific findings in poster.
An information literacy session will follow each section of the class. After the session, students in groups will produce a paper in which they identify a problem in colonial studies, provide a tentative research path, locate sources and summarize them, and insert their opinion in the scholarly conversation. With special focus placed in colonial visual culture, each student will also research for and analyze an image that converses with the images presented in the section. Students will use the journal module on Moodle to document their research, including source summaries and image confrontation, and integrate the journal content into their final research paper.
Students completed an environmental policy analysis assignment, analyzing the range of perspectives on their policy topic. They kept research logs, traced the legislative history of their environmental policy, wrote a research memo that represented the perspective of an assigned policy actor, and enacted a U.S. Congressional Hearing on a current policy topic.
Students developed their political science research skills by learning how to formulate good political science research questions, select and conduct case studies, and respond to peer reviews of research-in-progress. Through a literature review assignment, students developed an understanding of the importance of situating research in existing theoretical debates and learned how to organize existing scholarship into foils or building blocks for their own arguments. Students also wrote a reflective essay on their research process.
Students completed a literature review project in which they traced the history of how economists have answered a monetary policy question. Each student synthesized and dissected an academic journal article, presented it to the class, and then led a discussion on it.
For the first few weeks, students (in groups) summarized articles they found and evaluated the degree to which the research followed the principles of green chemistry. They then deduced the attitude of the scientific community toward the research presented using resources that cited their primary article. During the second half of the semester, students found a primary investigator (PI) from a major research institution whose research focus is the application of their assigned type of catalysis to hydrocarbon valorization. They prepared an annotated bibliography of articles by the PI and reviewed the work to evaluate the “greenness” of the PI’s approach to hydrocarbon valorization.
Each week, students found an article relevant to a new topic introduced in class, summarized it, and assessed it by considering its purpose and appropriateness for the intended audience, its research design, quality of the data presented, contribution to the ongoing scientific conversation, and previous research the current study is built upon. For a final project, students selected a concept from readings and class lectures and did further research to explore its application to modern day Pennsylvania. Their research culminated in an NSF-style research grant proposal.
Students looked at different types of sources including literature, theology, film and memorials and examined how they contribute to the collective memory of the Holocaust. In their weekly synthesis of assigned readings, students not only summarized the author’s argument but also looked at the evidence base for the argument and compared and contrasted it with what they have learned from other sources. A few weeks into the course, students researched a new source related to the course content. They also submitted a “shelfie” with a book in the library stacks and had a class discussion on the search or pre-search process. The final project was a research paper completed in stages: a proposal outlining the paper topic and why it is significant along with a short annotated bibliography of three sources, a 4-5 page annotated bibliography submitted a month later, and final paper and students’ reflection on their research process.
Students researched and annotated a Chinese painting, its form, technique, materials, and function. They led a class discussion on the history of Chinese paintings at a museum and assessed two museum web sites as well as presented on a specific Chinese artist or genre of Chinese painting. Throughout the semester, students kept a journal in which they provided a synopsis of each assigned reading, identifying and assessing the author’s argument and evidence. They evaluated two sources in their journals each week and documented their research process. Prior to completing final papers, students wrote an abstract for their own paper accompanied by a bibliography.
Students described and discussed how they search for information about something of interest, what problems they run into, how information is organized, and what gaps exist. Once they chose a topic, students did a concept mapping exercise to understand the different concepts and areas related to their topics, after which they refined their topic, developed a research question, and explained the research methods appropriate for their study. Students then conducted a literature review and identified the major conversations related to their research question as well as at least two lead scholars and their work. They also explained how their research question fits in the scholarly conversation. The final project, a 12-15 page research design, tied together all these assignments.
Students explored how current and historical art practitioners engage with the given ideas and processes and how their work has been received. As students progressed in their research, they were expected to venture into other disciplines. Their research findings were recorded in journals and shared with the class weekly. Student also learned about issues related to copyright and fair use of images. At the end of the semester, students gave a public presentation of their work, during which they discussed the process of identifying and developing their ideas.
Each week, students identified and explored two different kinds of sources for their own research project. They documented their research process, summarized key arguments, and analyzed evidence of the sources in a research journal. Students visited Special Collections to learn about finding and analyzing primary sources and led a class discussion on primary sources.
Students explored the history and ethics as well as intellectual property rights related to print advertisement. They used Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers to examine the changing artistic and critical perspectives toward graphic novels as a genre. They also used popular and scholarly sources to look at different critical approaches to television.
Students compiled an annotated bibliography on their chosen topic, which served as the foundation for a final paper. The annotations included a critical assessment of the authors’ arguments in relation to others on the same topic. They were also expected to identify two different disciplinary perspectives on a topic, such as a documentary and a satire, or a scientific paper and a policy white paper, and analyze how and why the sources differ.
Students researched the intellectual history of a particular theoretical movement or theory. They also identified and compared different types of conversations about a film, ranging from scholarly sources to film reviews and blogs. A final research paper gave students an opportunity to conduct further research, reflect on how their relationship to theory had changed (or not), and evaluate their research process.
Students examined the “chain of statistical information” in a research article: Who produced the data? Is it free or fee based? Why? How has it been aggregated or modified before being incorporated by the source? What more detailed or accurate data is available? What claims have been made using this data? Are they justified? What are the limitations of the study? What access to the data do readers have?
Students explored issues from both social sciences and legal perspectives to understand how research is conducted and written in various disciplines. They compared sources and reflected on their similarities and differences.
Students synthesized weekly readings, examining their cultural context and/or how information in them was collected. They also had discussions about the process of doing international research on gender with two experts in the field.
Students analyzed a variety of sources including Special Collection materials to understand how historical and political contexts shape people’s conceptions of Islam and the research on Islam in the west.
Students compared the representation of animal-related issues in the popular media with representations in academic writings and analyzed a particular use of transgenic animals in science and technology or the representation of such practices in contemporary art.
Students used electronic and printed resources to explore ongoing conversations among scholars through critical analysis and examination of evidence in scholarly readings and book reviews and in their peers’ papers.
Students learned how to evaluate scholarly and popular articles, web sites, and films portraying medical information.
Students found and examined primary and secondary sources to understand how historical and musical events were documented and transmitted. They also kept a journals of their research process.
Students explored how literary history had been shaped by authors, publishers, readers, critics, and editors. They researched the reception history of a particular text to understand how and why the critical conversation around it has changed over time.
By creating a bibliography, students explored the factors that determined the relevance of information, such as when it was published, by whom, in which journal, and within which tradition.
Students learned how to follow related research through citations and interviewed computer science faculty and those working in the field to compare how experts and novices gather and use information.
Students traced the development of Anime-related electronic resources from the 1990s to the present and learned about what constitutes a quality web resource by creating a site of their own.
Students examined the nature and cause of the changing perspectives of the Boxer Rebellion over the past century and compared literary, journalistic, scholarly, and official materials about the Cultural Revolution.
Students learned how to locate and critique primary scientific literature. To enhance their understanding of the research process and to compare how novice and experts gathered information, students interviewed people working in the neuroscience field.
Students explored databases appropriate for biomedical engineering and kept a research journal for their research process.
Students traced the development of an idea in the literature over a period of five to ten years. They also compared the differences between press accounts and scholarly work on the same topic.
Students looked at issues of data quality as they learned about GIS and other information analysis techniques. They looked at how and why the data was created, the spatial reference system used and depth of entity information.
Students looked at how popular and scholarly sources differed in describing a conflict and how and why information about it might affect the course of the conflict. Throughout the project, students reflected on their research process.
Students studied the Stalinist period and the historical debates surrounding it over the past fifty years. They explored the English-language literature on Stalinism as primary sources that revealed historical paradigms and the ways that they were challenged.
Students learned how the economics literature is structured by looking at literature reviews and writing two reviews of their own. They also examined and evaluated how economic data is collected, by whom, and for what purpose.
Students wrote a series of papers about different aspects of a Congress member using both the member’s web site and secondary sources.
By incorporating complex library research exercises into their writing assignments, students learned how information is collected and organized in the field. They also reflected on their developing research skills through online journals.
Students learned to distinguish primary and secondary sources, peer-reviewed and public-access materials, and examined how the sources of information influence the content.
Students traced the reception of a literary work through at least 20 years of critical literature.