Academic Critique, including general research

Academic critique requires students to read carefully and analytically complex prose, to discern academic claims and the research that supports these claims, to synthesize multiple claims and research findings, and to generate and develop their own thesis.

While students will discover in their research process articles written by scholars in various disciplines, they will be using general rather than discipline-specific research indexes (e.g., Academic Search Premiere). Students will, however, learn to discriminate between academic and nonacademic sources, to evaluate the validity of sources, and to distinguish between discipline-based indexes and commercial search engines. There will be special attention paid to using the Internet for research and to evaluating Internet sources. The library component of the course will be developed in consultation with reference librarians at Young Library.