The following two assignments are designed to help develop your critical thinking skills and will be worth

a total of 10% of your grade.

Critical Reading Essay

The critical reading assignment is designed to give you practice independently analyzing scientific articles. For this assignment you will need to read one of the following articles. 1. DeWall, C. N., MacDonald, G., Webster, G. D., Masten, C. L., Baumeister, R. F., Powell, C., Combs, D., Schurtz, D. R., Stillman, T. F., Tice, D. M., and Eisenberger, N. I. (2010) Acetaminophen reduces social pain: Behavioral and Neural evidence. Psychological Science 21 (7), 931-937. 2. Skues, J. L., Williams, B., and Wise, L. (2012) The effects of personality traits, selfesteem, loneliness, and narcissism on Facebook use among university stuidents. Computers in Human Behavior 28, 2414-2419. 3. Brashares, J. S. (2003) Ecological, behavioral, and life-history correlates of mammal extinctions in West Africa. Conservation Biology 17, 733. After you read the article, you will write a 400-word critique of the article, outlining one strength and one weakness of the article, focusing primarily on the methodology. In writing your critique try to focus on depth rather than breadth. Describe your points in detail and be sure to explain how they relate to or might affect the findings of the article. If possible, suggest other methodologies or solutions for the limitations of the study. You can provide a few sentences of introduction and conclusion to your critique, but the focus should be on the assessment of the article. You do not need to provide a summary of the article for this assignment. Use the following guidelines on reading and evaluating scientific literature.

Reading Scientific Literature

When reading a scientific article, it is important to grasp the broad picture first the questions being asked and the nature of the evidence being presented before becoming bogged down in the details. Rather than reading straight through, try this order: First, read the abstract, the paragraph just below the title that summarizes the articles questions, methods, and conclusions. Second, look at the illustrations. The figures, charts, and tables show the data collected. If you dont understand the figures in detail right away, dont worry; youll spend much more time on them later. Next you will want to look at the

methods and results sections to get a better overall sense of what the authors did and what they found. The methods section of the article (occasionally labeled with a separate heading), is usually placed close to the introduction, but sometimes comes towards the end of the article. This section will provide a step-by-step description of how the data were obtained (e.g., 57 patients diagnosed with Parkinsons disease were tested for . . .), though some details will be omitted if they are generally familiar to the journals target audience (We performed a standard Type I assay on . . .). Finally move on to the introduction and conclusions. The introduction will provide some additional insight into the background and motivation for the research strategy that was adopted. The conclusions will summarize the results and implications. When reading an article it is OK to skip over a word, sentence, or paragraph as long as you understand the next one. You may find it necessary to read the article multiple times, but with each reading you should make the effort to decipher more and more of the details. Remember there are online tools (Google is your friend), library resources (e.g., medical dictionaries), and human help (e.g., me) available to assist you.

Evaluating Scientific Literature

The purpose of this section is to help you develop the ability to discern quality and usefulness of scientific articles. While scientific peer-review is a good system, it is imperfect and even prestigious journals publish poorly structured articles. Often, some of the most creative articles are published in fringe journals or on the web, because the ideas are too edgy (or unsupported by data) for mainstream journals. Hence, just because something is published in a good journal doesn't mean that it is a good article, and viceversa. So what should you look for in reading an article? A list of points follows that includes some comments to help guide you both in critical reading and in writing a review of a scientific article. In preparing your critique and term paper, you should use these questions to guide and outline your paper. However, you certainly should not try to answer all these questions in your written assignment. 1. Identify the hypothesis the authors are trying to test in the article and describe how this hypothesis fits within the context of what is known in the field. (1/4 credit) It is important to summarize the main questions presented in the article - often, doing so helps you set up your analysis. In the extreme, if the authors do not state their hypothesis clearly, then how are you supposed to evaluate their contribution to our understanding of the broader topic you are interested in? 2. What do the authors do to test their hypothesis? Focus on the methodology used in the article. What do they measure and how? Do you think the experimental design is reasonable? Do the data support the conclusions drawn by the authors? What could have been done to improve the study? (1/2 credit)

Study the methods closely. Often, flawed methods are at the heart of a poor paper. In particular consider the following: A. What proxies are used, if any? What assumptions are inherent in the proxies being used? How much confidence can we have in those assumptions? B. What controls do the authors use, and what variables do they attempt to control for? Did they miss any potentially confounding variables, or are the controls effective? C. What sources of systematic error might be present in the experiment? Are there any random errors? D. Was the authors use of statistics appropriate? E. Was the study observational, longitudinal, or an experiment (with controls)? If you find fault with the studys design, why do you think the authors made those choices? Was it an oversight, or were there barriers to doing the study differently? F. Is the sample size sufficient given the question being addressed? Is it reliable and representative of the target audience? Was the sample randomly chosen? G. Does the evidence provided justify the authors conclusions? Could there be a different explanation for the same data? Can the authors truly distinguish causation from correlation? Are the conclusions too strong or overly cautious? H. Are there any solutions for limitations or flaws that you found in the study? How might you have done the study differently to address these issues? 3. Focus on the data presented; choose one or two key figures in the article to critique. (1/8 credit) A. Are the key results clearly stated or buried amidst a litany of irrelevant or unimportant data? Do the authors clearly state and test hypotheses, or use strong, comparative approaches? In studying the results, it is critical to ensure that the authors clearly present their data and show what they have discovered. 4. What would you do next? A good scientific article will answer questions, but lead to many more. (1/8 credit) A. Do the results have relevance to the larger question the researchers wish to address? Can you think of a topic to which the result may be applicable beyond what the authors describe?

Term paper
For the term paper, you will have an opportunity to choose your own science-related topic and investigate a scientific article on this topic. The format of the term paper should be a scientific narrative with transitions between sections and a clear introduction and conclusion. Your analysis will focus on critical thinking skills and scientific habits of mind developed throughout the semester. For this assignment you will first select a topic and write an outline of the main points that you will cover in your paper. You will then write a 1000-word review that critically

evaluates the data presented in the article you chose and send this draft to me and a peer partner from the class. You and your partner will trade term papers and review (using Track Changes) each others work. You will then submit a final version of your term paper, as well as the version reviewed by your partner, showing the edits/comments made by your partners in Track Changes.

Choosing an Article for your Term Paper

The scientific article that you select must conform to the following: 1. It must have been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. 2. It must have been published in your lifetime. 3. It should report on a scientific experiment, measurements or observations undertaken by its authors, and include documentation of those data (i.e. if you are unsure, look for graphs or tables that show conclusions drawn from the data). 4. Review articles, which summarize the results of multiple studies, are NOT suitable, i.e. if the article says review in the title or above the article title, then it is not suitable for this assignment. Review articles typically synthesize rather than create new information. They do not contain original data, which is why you cant use them for this assignment. First, think of a topic or question that interests you. You may think of a big picture question, such as What recent progress has been made in the fight against Parkinsons disease? In practice, individual scientific studies are done on much smaller questions, so you will narrow your big picture question down to a specific question as you progress with your search. One strategy for narrowing your topic and finding a paper is to use an academic search engine. Many of these (Web of Science, Google Scholar, PubMed, JSTOR) are linked to in the Research Guide on the Courseworks Lecture site. If I enter environmental causes of Parkinsons disease into the Web of Science, it returns 146 results. Looking through these I find a review article on whether exposure to the agricultural chemical paraquat contributes to Parkinson's. As outlined in the requirements above, a review article is not suitable for the assignment. However, it will contain descriptions and references to other articles that are suitable. This review article references studies (which can be found via References Cited) not only on whether paraquat contributes to Parkinson's, but also studies on other possible environmental causes (metals, solvents, and carbon monoxide), all of which could be used for the term assignment. A second strategy is to look for news articles on a recent study. Searching Parkinson's disease in Google News leads to an article from www.aboutlawsuits.com on a recent study from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences linking the pesticides rotenone and paraquat to Parkinsons. News articles will either link to the scientific

article directly or give you enough information to find it (the journal in which it is published and at least one of the authors names). In this case, there is a link to the journal article published in Environmental Health Perspectives. As with the review article, a number of past studies that may be of interest are cited in its introductory paragraphs. A third strategy is to browse through high profile, general academic journal such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These journals contain academic articles, but they also include short news write-ups about many of the articles in each issue, which will enable you to decipher what the articles are about more easily. The Columbia library has an excellent academic journal subscription. Almost all journal articles will be automatically accessible for free if you are using a Columbia internet connection. If youre off campus, go to the CU library site, click on the journals tab, and enter the journal in which the article was published. There will usually be a number of journal providers whose link you can click on and access using your Columbia uni/password.

Peer Review
Just as critiquing the scientific literature should not be an inherently negative act, neither should reviewing the work of your peers. When editing your partners paper, you should begin by looking for grammatical errors and issues of clarity. Be sure that you can identify the primary arguments the paper is making and think of ways in which your partner might be more succinct in his/ her analysis. Does the paper flow logically from one section to the next? Does the paper have a clear introduction, critique, and conclusion? Is the broader significance of the study discussed in the introduction? Are alternative methods or further questions considered in the conclusion? Once you clearly understand the main arguments, consider how they relate to the study being evaluated. Are the strengths and weaknesses discussed truly critical to the broader significance of the article and the questions being addressed, i.e. are the issues your partner brings up likely to impact the results of the scientific article? Is the critique constructive, i.e. are alternative methodologies considered and outlined in addition to discussing the flaws? If necessary, read over the methods and results from the original scientific article to further evaluate the integrity of the strengths and weaknesses discussed in the term paper. Deadlines Critical Reading Essay Term paper topic (email to me) Term paper article + outline (email to me) Term paper draft (email to me and your partner) Peer review of term paper Final term paper October 2 October 9 October 21 November 13 November 25 December 9