The Sharable Research Summary is a way of communicating new and interesting psychology research at a level that is easily understandable to students who are new to the field. The basic idea is to speed the communication of new findings in psychology to a much broader audience by making the research summary in the form of a learning object that can be used by both instructors and students to share psychology research. The Sharable research summary is more than a research news release and less than a formal review of a published research article. The summary is different from the article abstract in that it is written for students rather than researchers and has more of the important details as well as a critical thinking review of the article. Lastly, the summary assignment is an opportunity for the advanced student to teach others about an interesting research article in psychology and gain a deeper understanding psychology in the process.

In order to make the assignment as useful as possible the summary is to be packaged in a way that will enable distribution by means of federated Learning Object Repositories. This organization as a learning object involves structuring the information in the summary in a way that is easy to index and search as well as to repurpose for particular teaching situations. The basic structure has 14 main parts:

    SUMMARY Title:
    BACKGROUND
    GOAL
    METHOD
    FINDINGS
    EXPLANATION

    COMMENTS about the Background:
    Comments about the Goal:
    Comments about the Methods:
    Comments about the Findings:
    Comments about the Explanation:
    Additional Comments:
    CREDITS
    SELFTEST

The plan is for each student to nominate and ordered list of 5 articles for possible summaries that are both interesting and can be found in PsycArticles database. A futther limitation on the possible article is that they must have been published after 2002. This first part of the summary assignment is due on May 20 at the beginning of class.

From the nominated articles the summaries will be assigned to pairs of students to produce two summaries. For one of the summaries the student will take on the role of summary author and for the other one the student will take on the role of reviewer/editor. Both students of the pair will be marked on both summaries produced.

The first summary is due on June 10 and the second one is due on July 15. Additionally we will be evaluating two summary production environments that are intended to facilitate the process of producing sharable research summaries.

The Research Teacher Term Project Deliverables:(minus 20% for each day of missed deadlines)

Ordered list of 5 nominated articles with copies of abstracts available in PsycArticles published in 2003 or 2004 only {3%}

Two collaboratively authored sharable research summaries structured as learning objects with spoken presentations suitable for students with impaired vision (The spoken part may also include a live class presentation of the prepared summary){6% for each summary}

Evidence of collaborating in the role of an author and the role of and the role of a reviewer/editor in producing the sharable research summaries structured as learning objects {3% for discussion entries on project}

No more than one assigned presentation to the class of a sharable research summary (a reading style slide show presentation of the learning object with a short class discussion ) {1%}

00. (optional review a good model of a sharable research summary)

01. find an interesting cognition article in PsychArticles published after 2002

02. study the article (PRTR style: Preview Read Think Review)

03. decide you can summarize the article (arrange for help or find another article)

04. fill in the reference data into the sharable research summary format: srsblank.txt

05. find and summarize the hypothesis or goal

06. find and summarize the methods

07. from the introduction make an outline of the logic to the hypothesis or goal

08. find and summarize the key results that support or fail to support the hypothesis

    (both the introduction and the first part of the discussion may be helpful here)


09. find and summarize the explanation of the results from the discussion

10. find and summarize the implications of the findings from the discussion

11. check that your summaries are consistent with the Abstract

12. reread your draft summary and reread the article appling critical thinking analysis

    (make notes by section of your criticisms and observations of the article)


13. Write your comments sections

14. check that your comments and your section summaries are consistant

15. reread aloud and edit your whole summary assignement to make it smooth sounding prose

16. listen to your summary or enlist some to critically listen to find any confusing parts

17. fix the confusing parts (spell check, grammar check, and reading level check)

18. make a copy of the sentences in each section for developing the self test questions

19. for each important sentence try to make it into a fill-in-the-blank self test item

     (edit the better self test items to replace pronouns so they make sense out of context)
     (the format for selftest question is starting a margin and 2 underlines and a space on the selftest questions should be in the respective parts of the assignment)
     (the intention of the selftest questions is to facilitate remembering the important concepts so in general the answer should be an important 1 or 2 word phrase)
     (do not use numbers for answers and in general avoid personal names as answers)
20. proof and edit your entire summary checking for typos, thinkos, and incomplete parts.

    

21. select the intellectual property licence for distribution

22. preview your summary in the sharable research summary converter: showdraft.html

22. submit the summary on schedule for marking by the instructor

23. make appropriate edits to address the comments from the instructor.

24. submit the final version for publication in the learning object repository.

25. make a backup copy of the final version for safe keeping.

Alternate Research Teacher Term Project is to collaboratively author and review/edit 2 sharable research summaries of articles related to cognitive psychology that have been published in 2003 or 2004 and are available in the PsycArticles Database. The summaries are to be highly structured learning objects with language targeted at new students of psychology in Grade 12. The support site for the alternate project is at url: http://psyc100.edutools.ca/srs/ popup new window

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