Academic Inquiry

About this week

During this second week of the course, you will begin to work on the course’s first major assignment, Project 1: The Research Process. The first step in this assignment will be to understand a portion of the academic conversation taking place with this project’s topic: media literacy. You will do this by reading within this topic and developing a research question based on those readings. At the end of the week you will submit a Preliminary Project Proposal, within which you will define the parameters of the research process you will engage in for this project.

Note: Be sure to review this week’s discussion board assignment before completing the readings.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn how to choose a research topic by engaging in academic inquiry
• Learn about a variety of research strategies including using library databases, developing research questions, and defining search terms
• Understand the importance of Intellectual Property

Task List:

1. Consume this week’s required readings and media
2. Review the “Do I Need to Cite That?” infographic
3. Participate in Discussion #2: Reviewing Five Media Literacy Articles for Ideas and Topics
4. Complete Low-Stakes Assignment #2: Research Process Proposal

Required Readings with Instructions

In preparation for this week’s discussion post, you first need to review the following five media literacy articles and the instructions below for reading them. These readings are peer-reviewed, academic sources about media literacy, the topic for Project 1. Once you have a research topic, you then need to conduct preliminary research to help narrow your topic’s focus. Rather than ask you to find peer-reviewed, academic sources on your own, five sample sources have been provided to start your research process:

Cooper, Caren B. “Media Literacy as a Key Strategy toward Improving Public Acceptance of Climate Change Science” Cooper-C.-Media-Literacy-and-Climate-Change-ScienceDownload

Koltay, Tibor. “The Media and the Literacies: Media Literacy, Information Literacy, Digital Literacy” Koltay-T.-The-media-and-the-literaciesDownload

McLean, Sian. “Does Media Literacy Mitigate Risk for Reduced Body Satisfaction Following Exposure to Thin-Ideal Media?”McLean2016_Article_DoesMediaLiteracyMitigateRiskFDownload

Mihailidis, Paul. “Media Literacy as a Core Competency for Engage Citizenship in a Participatory Democracy.” Mihailidis-P.-Media-Literacy-Engage-CitizenshipDownload

Potter, James W. “The State of Media Literacy” Potter-J.-The-State-of-Media-LiteracyDownload

As you read these articles: 

• Do not read these sources word for word. You are reviewing them to find a research question or focus within the larger topic of media literacy. Skim the articles in order to gather ideas and consider possible directions in your research: read the abstracts (if provided), look at the introductions and conclusions, review the subheadings, etc. Remember to jot down ideas as you review the readings, as you will include these in your discussion post.
• Once you have a list of ideas, choose three potential ideas/topics, and write two or three open-ended questions about each topic. These questions should help you develop a research question—something you would like to investigate or know more about. Make sure they are not yes or no questions: they need to be open-ended questions with complex answers.

Required Media

The following three videos will introduce you to the process of academic inquiry, to the Newman Library (where you will conduct your research for this class), and to the academic databases you will use to find specific articles. These are very important skills, so please pay attention to these videos and take notes.

• Academic Integrity Information from SPS (6:37)
• An Introduction to the Newman Library (6:23)
• Accessing Databases in the Newman Library (1:01)
• How to Find Articles (1:52) While this resource is from the John Jay library, it is useful to review since it discusses how to choose search terms, it defines scholarly or peer-reviewed articles, and it explains how to find databases.

“Do You Need to Cite That?” Infographic

View the infographic below or open the “infographic flow chart.pdf” file if you are visually impaired.
Do-You-Need-to-Cite-That (47KB)Download
infographic-flow-chart (105KB)Download

This file and many other resources are also available in the Knowledge Bank. I strongly suggest you explore that part of the course whenever you’d like additional resources about grammar, sentence structure, writing process, or citation.

Week 2 Discussion

After you’ve reviewed the above materials, head to this week’s discussion. Respond to the prompt by Thursday at 11:59pm. Then read the comments posted by your classmates and respond to at least two of them by Sunday at 11:59pm. Do your best to fully engage with their posts by responding to a specific point they made. For more information, see the discussion rubric on the Rubrics page.

LSA 2: Research Process Proposal

ENG-101-LSA-2 (103KB)Download

Before you start this assignment, make sure you’ve completed the discussion assignment for this week. To start on your research process proposal, review your topic ideas again and choose one to focus on. Then, map out a plan for how you will start to investigate this topic.

Refer to the Newman Library database video and identify the databases you will use to start this research and also consider the key terms you will use as you search those databases. You do not need to begin the actual research now. At this point, you are only being asked to plan the research. 

See the assignment sheet, LSA-2, above for the full assignment instructions. Due by Sunday, 11:59pm.