Apr 01, · In Canada, standard quality assessment criteria for research papers have been developed, and these deal separately with quantitative and qualitative research studies (Kmet et al., ). However, it is not our goal to distinguish some types of scientific methods that are inherently ‘good’ from others that may be ‘bad’.Cited by: Dec 05, · 2. Look for an intriguing title on the first page. Check for an engaging title that explains the topic of the research paper. A strong research title should reflect the tone of the 80%(2) Current research evaluation approaches as applied to individual researchers, programs, and research units are still based primarily on measures of academic outputs (publications and the prestige of the publishing journal), citations, and peer assessment (Boix-Mansilla a; Feller ; Erno-Kjolhede and Hansson ). While these indicators of research quality remain Cited by:
Assessing Research Quality | Research Connections
Inassessing research paper, a textbook being used in fourth grade classrooms in Virginia became big news for all the wrong reasons. The book, assessing research paper, Our Virginia by Joy Masoff, had caught the attention of a parent who was helping her child do her homework, according to an article in The Washington Post.
Carol Sheriff was a historian for the College of William and Mary and as she worked with her daughter, she began to notice some glaring historical errors, not the least of which was a passage which described assessing research paper thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War.
Further investigation into the book revealed that, although the author had written textbooks on a variety of subjects, she was not assessing research paper trained historian. The research she had done to write Our Virginia, assessing research paper, and in particular the information she included about Black Confederate soldiers, was done through the Internet and included sources created by groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization which promotes views of history that de-emphasize the assessing research paper of slavery in the Civil War.
How did a book with errors like these come to be used as part of the curriculum and who was at fault? Was it Masoff for using untrustworthy sources for her research? Was it the editors who allowed the book to be published with these errors intact?
Was it the school board for approving the book without more closely reviewing its accuracy? Using inaccurate, irrelevant, or poorly researched sources can affect the quality of your own work. Being able to understand and apply the concepts that follow is crucial to becoming a assessing research paper savvy user and creator of information, assessing research paper. The Evaluate pillar states that individuals are able to review the research process and compare and evaluate information and data.
It encompasses important knowledge and abilities. The first section of this chapter will talk about some of the ideas and concepts behind evaluating sources the abilities in the above listassessing research paper, while the second section will give you the opportunity assessing research paper put your evaluation skills into practice.
Information is published in a variety of formats, each with its own special considerations when it comes to evaluation. Consider the following formats. Social media is a assessing research paper rising star in the landscape of information gathering. Facebook updates, assessing research paper, tweets, wikis, and blogs have made information creators of us all and have a strong influence not just on how we communicate with each other but also on how we learn about current events or discover items of interest.
So do people really use social media for research? Currently, the main use for social media like tweets and Facebook posts assessing research paper as primary sources that are treated as the objects under study rather than sources of information on a topic.
But now that the Modern Language Association has a recommended way to cite a tweet, social media may, in fact, be gaining credibility as a resource, assessing research paper.
These days, social media will generally be among the first to cover a big news story, with news media writing an article or report after more information has been gathered. News articles are written by journalists who either report on an event they have witnessed firsthand, or after making contact with those more directly involved. The focus is on information that is of immediate interest to the public and these articles are written in a way that a general audience will be able to understand.
These articles go through a fact-checking process, but when a story is big and the goal is to inform readers of urgent or timely information, inaccuracies may occur. In research, news articles are often best treated as primary sources, especially if they were published immediately after a current event. While news articles and social media tend to concentrate on what happened, how it happened, who it happened to, and where it happened, magazine articles are more about understanding why something happened, usually with the benefit of at least a little hindsight.
Writers of magazine articles also fall into the journalist category and rely heavily on investigation and interviews for research. Fact-checking in magazine articles tends to be more accurate because magazines publish less frequently than news outlets and have more time to get facts right. Depending on the focus of the magazine, articles may cover current events or just items of general interest to the intended audience.
The language may be more emotional or dramatic than the factual tone of news articles, but the articles are written at a similar reading level so as to appeal to the widest audience possible, assessing research paper. Scholarly articles are written by and for experts in a field and generally describe formal research studies or experiments conducted to provide new insight on a topic rather than reporting current events or items of general interest.
This assessing research paper that before an article is published, assessing research paper, it undergoes a review process in order to confirm that the information is accurate and the research it discusses is valid.
This process adds a level of credibility to the article that you would not find in assessing research paper magazine or assessing research paper article. Scholarly articles tend to be long and feature specialized language that is not easily understood by someone who does not already have some level of expertise on assessing research paper topic. Though they may not be as easy to use, they carry a lot of weight in a research context, especially if you are working in a field related to science or technology, assessing research paper.
These sources will give you information to build on in your own original research. Books have been a staple of the research process since Gutenberg invented the printing press because a topic can be covered in more depth in a book than in most other types of sources.
Also, the conventional wisdom for books is that anyone can write one, but only the best ones get published, assessing research paper. This is becoming less true as books are published in a wider variety of formats and via a wider variety of venues than in previous eras, which is something to be aware of when using a book for research purposes. For now, the editing process for formally published books is still in place and research in the humanities, which includes topics such as literature and history, continues to be published primarily in this format.
When choosing a source for your research, what criteria do you usually use? Gauging whether the source relates to your topic at all is probably one, assessing research paper. How high up it appears on the results list when you search may be another.
Beyond that, assessing research paper, you may base your decision at least partly on how easy it is to access. These are all important criteria, to varying degrees, but there are other criteria you may want to keep in mind when deciding if a source will be useful to your research. Scholarly journals and books are traditionally considered to be higher quality information sources because they have gone through a more thorough editing process that ensures the quality of their content.
Generally, you also pay more to access these sources or may have to rely on a library or university to pay for access for you. Information on the Internet can also be of a high quality but there is less of a quality assurance process in place for much of that information.
In the current climate, the highest quality information even on the Internet often requires a subscription or other form of payment for access. A source is accurate if the information it contains is correct. To determine whether a source is accurate, you need to look more deeply at the content of the source, including where the information in the source comes from and what evidence the author uses to support their views and conclusions. It also helps to compare your source against another source.
A reader of Our Virginia may not have reason to believe the information the author cites from the Sons of Confederate Veterans website is inaccurate, but if assessing research paper compared the book against another source, the inconsistencies might become more apparent, assessing research paper.
Relevance has to do with deciding whether the source actually relates to your topic and, if it does, how closely it relates. Some sources may be an exact match; for others, you may need to consider a particular angle or context before you can tell whether the source applies to your topic.
When searching for relevant sources, you should keep an open mind—but not too open, assessing research paper. You can assess the relevance of a source by comparing it against your research topic or research question. Keep in mind that the source may not assessing research paper to match on all points, but it should match on enough points to be usable for your research beyond simply satisfying a requirement for an assignment.
An example of bias is when someone expresses a view that is one-sided without much consideration for information that might negate what they believe, assessing research paper. Bias is most prevalent in sources that cover controversial issues where the author may attempt to persuade their readers to one side of the assessing research paper without giving fair consideration to the other side of things.
If the research topic you are using has ever been the cause of heated debate, assessing research paper, you will need to be especially watchful for any bias in the sources you find, assessing research paper. Bias can be difficult to detect, particularly when we are looking at persuasive sources that we want to agree with.
When deciding whether there is bias in a source, assessing research paper, look for dramatic language and images, poorly supported evidence against an opposing viewpoint, assessing research paper, or a strong leaning in one direction.
Is the author of the source you have found a professor at a university or a self-published blogger? If the author is a professor, are they respected in their field or is their work heavily challenged? What about the publication itself? Is it held in high regard or relatively unknown? Digging a little deeper to find out what you can about the reputation of both the author and the publication can go a long way toward deciding whether a source is valuable.
You can investigate the reputation of an author by looking at any biographical information that is available as part of the source. Looking to see what else the author has published and whether this information has positive reviews is also important in establishing whether the author has a good reputation, assessing research paper. Credibility has to do with the believability or trustworthiness of a source based on evidence such as information about the author, the reputation of the publication, and how well-formatted the assessing research paper is.
How likely would you be to use a source that was written by someone with no expertise on a topic or a source that appeared in a publication that was known for featuring low quality information? Assessing research paper if the source was riddled with spelling and formatting errors? Looking at sources like these should inspire more caution. Objectively, credibility assessing research paper be determined by taking into account all of the other criteria discussed for evaluating a source.
Knowing that some types of sources, such as scholarly journals, are generally considered more credible than others, such as self-published websites, may also help, assessing research paper. Subjectively, deciding whether a source is credible may come down to a gut feeling. Evaluating information about the source from its title, author, and summary information is only the first step. The evaluation process continues when you begin to read the source in more detail and make decisions about how or whether you will ultimately use it for your own research.
When you begin to look more deeply at your source, pay close attention to the following features of a document. The purpose of the introduction to any piece that has one is to give information about what the reader can expect from the source as a whole.
There are different types of introductions, including forewords and prefaces that may be written by the author of the book or by someone else with knowledge of the subject. Most of the time, if your source is a book or an entire website, assessing research paper, it will be divided into sections that each cover a particular aspect of the overall topic, assessing research paper.
Looking over the table of contents or menu will help you decide whether you need the whole source or only pieces of it. Reviewing these references will give you a assessing research paper idea of the kind of work the author put into their own research. Did they put as much work into evaluating their sources as you are?
Can you tell from the citations if the sources used were credible? When were they published? Do they represent a fair balance of perspectives or do they all support a limited point of view? What information does the author use from these sources and in what way does he or she use that information?
Use your own research skills to spy on the research habits of others to help you evaluate the source. In the case of Our Virginia, the author used a biased source as part of her research and the inaccurate information she got from that source affected the quality of her own work.
Likewise, if anyone had used her book as part of their research, assessing research paper, it would have set off a chain reaction, since whatever information they cited from Our Virginia would naturally have to be called into assessing research paper, possibly diminishing the value of their own conclusions.
This takes extra time, but looking at the reference list, bibliography, or notes section of any source you use to gauge the quality of the research done by the author of that source can be an important extra step, assessing research paper.
For some researchers, the process of searching for and evaluating sources is a highly enjoyable, rewarding part of doing research, assessing research paper. Whichever end of the spectrum you most closely identify with, here are a few ideas about the ever-important skill of knowing when to stop. Novice researchers may find this number useful to understand how much research is considered appropriate for a particular topic.
However, assessing research paper, a common mistake is to focus more on the number of sources than on the quality of those sources.
Assessing the quality of qualitative research
, time: 9:40Evaluate: Assessing Your Research Process and Findings | Information Literacy
Dec 05, · 2. Look for an intriguing title on the first page. Check for an engaging title that explains the topic of the research paper. A strong research title should reflect the tone of the 80%(2) Apr 01, · In Canada, standard quality assessment criteria for research papers have been developed, and these deal separately with quantitative and qualitative research studies (Kmet et al., ). However, it is not our goal to distinguish some types of scientific methods that are inherently ‘good’ from others that may be ‘bad’.Cited by: Assessing Research Quality. This page presents information and tools to help evaluate the quality of a research study, as well as information on the ethics of research. The quality of social science and policy research can vary considerably. It is important that consumers of research keep this in mind when reading the findings from a research study or when considering
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