Thursday, December 10, 2009

Dr. Pittsley assignment

Hello

Several of us have had Dr. Pittsley's students at the reference desk. The basics of the assignment are as follows:

The students have to address a health topic using news articles, some of which that have to be from the city or area that the student is from. The rest can be national articles or reliable web based articles (WebMD, National Institute of Health, etc.)

He has his own citation format. They are to create a reference page and number the articles from 1 to ??. When they make references to an article in the paper, they are to cite it by listing the number of the article in the reference page (not footnotes or endnotes, just the numbers).

The following format has worked for me. Dr. Pittsley has emailed me via email and said that this is waht he is looking for. However, you may choose to more or less that I what I have done.

1. I read over the student's paper and notice everywhere that Dr. Pittsley has left a blue highlight for them to cite their source. I offer to them the many ways to make reference to a source.
Example 1: Johnson addresses childhood obesity by....
Example 2: Johnson goes on to say...
Example 3: Paraphrase or use a direct quote and list the article number at the end.

2. Then I look at there sources and make sure that they have used some local news articles and some national/international news articles. If not, I show them Lexis-Nexis and point out how to search for their topic and narrow the results geographically so that they can find articles from the region that they are from.

3. Finally, I make sure that they make a clear argument in the introduction as to how they will address their health topic or what they intend to accomplish in their paper. Then I look at the conclusion to be sure that they are consistent with the introduction.

Carl