Response Papers Guidelines
The Purpose of this type of assignment is to help you critically assess the assigned readings. This will also help you contribute in class discussions, and develop your own ideas.
Choose two of the assigned readings for the module. This excludes opinions from news papers (e.g. Scheidel 2020, or Wade 2020) or podcasts (Radiolab or Radioambulante)
Identifying the article(s)/chapter(s): Including the author(s) name, year of publication, title, place of publication (journal or book, pages, press). You can copy this information from the syllabus readings list.
Summary: Your summary should address most or all of the following questions:
What is the major question/problem addressed?
What was the author(s)s hypothesis(es) or thesis?;
Who or what was studied?;
What were the authors finds/results?
How were the results interpreted? Was the hypothesis(es) supported? If not, what new hypotheses did the authors offer as potential explanations of the results?;
What next steps in the research process were proposed?
Evaluation: This portion should include your evaluating comments regarding the information and validity of the study. Comments about the style or how entertaining the study was, are irrelevant and should be avoided. While writing your evaluation consider the following questions:
Was the information/sources reliable and valid? (did it relate to the questions/problems/intent of the paper, and if they used a sample, was it big enough?)
Are there potential confounding variables that were not addressed in the study;
Was there a good correspondence between the evidence and the conclusions?;
Are there limitations to the study that the authors did not mention?;
How generalizable are the findings?;
What future research should be build based on the conclusions of this study?
How does this study contribute to our understanding of human-disease interaction and co-evolution?
Format:
Margins: 1 inch all around
Font: Arial size 11
Line spacing: single space
Word count: Minimum of 400 words and maximum of 1000 words;
