Summary Week 6

We had to call a halt to our plans for the rest of the quarter. Our original plan was to have the students write up sections of the paper; we would edit and compile them. Things have not worked out well in that regard. Our revised goal for the quarter is to get a quality draft of the intro, literature review, and maybe methods section completed. The faculty will work alone on the results and discussion. 

Here are the key issues we are seeing in the students' work: 

1) We have found repeated errors in information attributed to different authors. Any statements given must be accurate. It is very possible that a given author may be a reviewer for the paper.

2)     There is a great deal of missing information, poorly written areas, and incorrect grammar.

3) Discussions about specific measures/ constructs must include literature only on the specific measure that we used. For example, you cannot have literature that used a health LOC measure in the discussion on our Levinson measure of LOC

4)   Authors' names must be spelled correctly and all info given in references must be correct. 

As a result we are having students fact-checking each citation and reference n week 7; they will work on editing the literature review the rest of the quarter. 

This was actually a very tough decision; we felt that we had made promises to the students to write the full paper this quarter. But we also felt we had to balance that with having a professional finished product. 

As I have been working on the qualitative data this week I am also coming to realize that we have a lot of really interesting data – with the result that this may be a longer and better work than initially anticipated. While that is great news it also raises the stakes, we have to have a really good draft to send off for review.

Lee Stadtlander