Assignment 1: Preliminary Bibliography Due on 3/7
You should have complete citations for 8-10 possible essays, as well as a brief discussion of how you found each and why you think it will be relevant given your research topic and questions. You should include annotations for the three essays that you have read. The annotation shoudl summarize what you learned from the essay that is helpful for your paper. For these three, you do not need to discuss how you found it and why you think it will be relevant. (Part of informal writing grade).

Assignment 2: Critical Reading of an academic (peer reviewed) essay – Due 3/14.
Your essay should be about 3-4 typed, double-spaced pages. You must analyze something that you are sure you will use in your paper.. This means that you must seriously consider which of the essays that you have found you will read carefully and review critically. The best way to do this is to skim possible essays before your more in-depth reading.

Choose an appropriate article-length essay (at least 15 pages). Read the essay and write a paper that indicates key points and does the kind of critical reading that we did earlier in the semester.

Grading criteria:
1. Evidence of careful reading
2. Quality of your summary (Have you given the reader a reasonable idea of what the author argues in the essay?)
3. Quality of your evaluation.
4. Clarity of your writing. (Have you written an abstract that is easy for the reader to read and that addresses your target audience?)
5. Complete and well-formatted citation and all appropriate page citations in the text.
6. Selection of an article that fits well with your topic.

This assignment will be graded and is part of your research project grade.

Note: You should be sure that you are paraphrasing properly and putting in all necessary page citations. Failure to do so is academic dishonesty.

Assignment 3: More precise definition of questions and reflection on what you have found – Due on 3/28.
Write a 1-2 page paper in which you: 1) Identify the research questions that will guide the construction of your literature review. Talk about how you see this as an important and interesting question and 2) turn in a bibliography containing 6 sources that you plan to use in your literature review. Provide a 1-2 sentence discussion of what each contributes to your developing literature review. Finally, write an additional page in which identify gaps in your research. (informal writing)

Assignment 4: Literature Review – 1st Draft due on 4/6 by 10:00 am.
You should have read 11 essays on your topic by the time you write the first draft. At least 9 should be included in your draft in a meaningful way. If you do not include 9 essays, I will still give you feedback, but the draft will not count as turned in. In addition to everything discussed below, your first draft should also include a few sentences in which you identify gaps in your research and a plan for addressing these gaps. You will have two opportunities to develop/refine/and rewrite this draft. You should take advantage of these opportunities.

Academic writing takes place within communities of scholars. The purpose of writing a literature review is to demonstrate that you have a grasp of the discussion that has already
taken place about a topic, an issue, a methodological perspective, or a problem. By demonstrating that you have read and thought about this literature, you establish your right to join in and further the conversation. So, when you write a literature review, you need to demonstrate not just that you’ve read and understood a number of essays, but that you understand how these essays are connected to, or in dialogue with, one another. You demonstrate this understanding by grouping the essays according to criteria that emerge from your reading. As you write your literature review, you must:

1) Demonstrate that you have read at least 15 essays on your topic (In your first draft, you need only use 10 sources). A book will count as 2 essays.
2) Discuss how points made in your essays are related to one another and to your research question. This means that you must come up with topics that are discussed by multiple authors.
3) Indicate an understanding of where conflicts exist between different authors and where authors agree with one another.
4) Discuss questions that have not been addressed very fully in what you’ve read. At least one of these questions should be the focus of your complete research proposal.
5) Provide a complete works cited list formatted consistently and with all necessary information.
6) Cite properly and wherever necessary.

The most important point is that you should not be discussing the reading that you've done author by author. You need to weave the readings together to provide an interpretation of how they fit together. In this sense, you are actively constructing your literature review; you are not passively reporting what others have said. At the same time, you must, of course, discuss the essays accurately.

Grading Criteria:
1) Evidence that you have carefully chosen your sources so that they address a topic thoroughly.
2) Organization: Your literature review should be organized by topic, not by author.
3 Proper use of sources. You do not need to quote widely in your literature review. However, where necessary you must include citations. If you paraphrase, be careful.
4) Well-formatted bibliography.
5) Proper number of academic sources.

Assignment 5: Methodology Discussion -- This will become a section of your research proposal. Due on 4/13 by 10:00 am.

Which of the questions that you believe need further investigate do you intend to investigate? If you are going to look at more than one, discuss how they are connected. What methodology do you intend to use to investigate this question or these questions? Why? Be as detailed as you can in discussing how you might go about your research and why you believe that a particular approach will be fruitful. If you have read studies that use similar methodologies, be sure to discuss this, as well as why you think this approach will work for your question(s). What are the strengths and weaknesses of the approach that you are suggesting? What are the key variables that you will explore in your study? How will you operationalize them? What relationship do you believe exists between them? How does your proposed method fit with the ontological and epistemological beliefs that you bring to your work?

Note: You should read an essay specifically about the method that you will use and use it to develop your proposal.

Assignment 6: Research Proposal – This is the fully developed proposal. It is due on 4/25.

You should include a couple of paragraphs in which you discuss what you have done and what you still intend to do.

Building on the work that you have done thus far, your research proposal should include:
1. An introduction in which you state the questions bout which you have done research, why these questions are interesting to you, and why they are important.
2. A revised and expanded literature review that summarizes your findings from the literature on your topic. Since you have a detailed literature review assignment, I'm not providing much detail here.
3. An identification of issues/questions that have arisen in your mind as a result of your literature review. That is, given what you have read, what gaps exist in the literature?
4. A discussion of which of the questions identified in 3 you intend to investigate. What methodology will use and why? What are your hypotheses? Justify these by referring back to the literature that you have reviewed. Basically, this is the revised version of your methodology proposal.
5. A conclusion. Again, tell the reader why your work is important and how it will contribute to building knowledge in your area. What implications might your research have for politics or for policy? What are the limitations of the study that you are proposing?

Your proposals should be approximately 15-20 typed, double-spaced pages. If I assigned any books or essays that fit with your research, I expect that you will use them in this paper, though you may not include them in the number of required sources. Failure to discuss them will lower your grade. You may turn in an additional page in which you discuss what you would do with your paper to make it better if you had not run out of time. Although this is by no means a substitute for completing the work,the ability to assess your own work is important and a good self-assessment will contribute positively to your grade.

Assignment 7: Revised full proposal. If you have not responded to feedback from the first complete draft, your grade will be lower than it otherwise would have been. This is due on Friday, May 11th.