Social Science 3A: Final Paper/Annotated Bibliography

Your final paper is built up around the various components of you assembled throughout the course. As you’ve done various components of the work, the final version has you assembling for use. Below each section, I note where you can look back to because you’ve already begun the vast majority of these parts, now it’s assembling, expansion, and editing.

This may seem a bit odd because it’s not really a “paper” in the sense you’re used to which, yes, that’s correct. But the process here is actually the core process that is used by the majority of researchers as we begin our own studies: we have an idea, get some basic understanding of its scope, read some literature to get a handle on the state of the field and broader/deeper knowledge of the topic, and form some beginning hypotheses from this to get us grounded on what we actually know and what we want to know.

For your final paper, you will need to submit a document that contain the following sections. These should be formatted generally in APA style:

• Double-spaced
• Size 12 font
• Times New Roman
• Hanging indent/alphabetical references list
• A cover page
  • remember to do the correct running head style
• Page numbers
• Make sure your name is on the first page
• Regarding length: I’m less concerned with a specific word count than I am about thoroughness. You have 5 annotations that you are completing, which are often around 2/3 of a page to 1 page each (so, it’ll probably be around 3.5 – 5 pages in that section). The intro is somewhere between 1/2 and 1 page. And the hypothesis section is 1/4 to a 1/2 page in length. This gives you a rough idea but content is more important than just having your paper be a certain length.

Paper structure

• Simple Introduction
  • Your introduction should introduce the reader to the general aspects of your topic. In this, I want you to present that topic you’ve been interested in, noting a research question and the logic/reasoning that you’re interested in this topic. Additionally, you must include a point drawn from either one of the data sites presented in the final week or from a trustworthy news source that gives some insight into the scale of the problem that you’re interested in. For example, if your paper is about college drinking, you’d want some sort of basic statistic that says what percent of college students drink (or, you could even fine tune it a bit further and do what percent of college students binge drink). This is so your reader/audience can understand and draw a sort of why is this an important topic. Make sure this is cohesive enough that the next section.

• • • Basic items from earlier weeks to use as the basis here: Project Idea
• Annotated Bibliography
  • Rather than have you assemble a literature review that links your articles together, you will need to do an annotated bibliography of your articles. For this, you will need a total of five academic, peer-reviewed articles (note: you’ve already found 3, so you’ll just expand on them as you find two more!). For these five articles, they can address the variables you’re interested in varying amounts. So, you could have two articles about race, only one on gender, and two on age. Each of annotations need to be a fully fleshed out annotated bibliography.
  • The best resource on this is OWL Purdue: Annotated Bibliographies (Links to an external site.)
    • (Links to an external site.)An important note is their annotation examples highlight a few different types including MLA, APA, and Chicago. The APA approach doesn’t include a reflection for using it in your own work (this is because the annotated bibliographies are meant to be a repository for your own use so that, if you’re writing another paper in the future and think you want to use a reference again, you can review your own notes to see if it’ll be useful). For this project, I want you to use the MLA approach to annotations: “a summary, an evaluation of the text, and a reflection on its applicability to his/her own research” (The Writing Lab, 2017). All five must have these 3 sections.

• • • Basic items from earlier weeks to use as the basis here: Project Idea; Finding (and Using) Relevant Literature
• Hypotheses
  • The last items that I want you to develop in this are a set of three hypotheses built from the literature. So, you’ve already spent some time on your articles and thinking about your topic and variables over the week. You’re going to end the components of this by articulating specific hypotheses from the literature you just assembled that would guide your own research. You don’t need to go into heavy or long explanations on this but the when your reader/audience sees your hypotheses, the annotations they just read should prime them on these. Basically, do these hypotheses connect to the annotations that I just read or do they seem to come out of left field.

• • • Basic items from earlier weeks to use as the basis here: The Importance of Getting the Hypotheses Right
• References
  • And, finally, a full references list that is correctly formatted. Remember, this will have six entries (your five articles and the background source from your introduction).

Rubric

Final Paper

Criteria	Ratings	Pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeFormatting	27 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	27 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeIntroduction	47 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	47 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeAnnotated Bibliography	127 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	127 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeHypotheses	47 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	47 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeReferences	27 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	27 pts
Total Points: 275 Final Powerpoint Slides

Note: you will not be graded on the slides as their own assignment. Rather, you will be presenting the slides (though I’m having you upload the slides as well just so there is an easy way for us to go through them: simply submitting the slides is not sufficient and you must make a presentation talk). You can use Yuja or another approach you’re comfortable with (Google Slides has it’s own approach) but you must record your presentation.

If you want to use Yuja, a newer software at UCI. It’s a great resource because it allows you, as students, to be able to record necessary videos and screen-capture as necessary. In terms of video capture software it is one of my favorites because it allows one to not have to be on screen (i.e. you don’t have to have it record video of you, simply of the screen). For help on setting up, and finding the necessary URL to complete Final Presentation (link to video!), please go to Setting up to do the YuJa presentation. Remember, you’re submitting your slides here so we can see them on their own but the link to video submission is the much more important step. Even if you create your video using a different program, you’re able to upload them to Yuja to get the URL.

Good presentations are skill unto themselves. Undoubtedly, we’ve all watched a presentation or lecture where the person has slides so overly crowded with information that we are stuck trying to listen, read, and write simultaneously and doing all of them poorly.

To push you to consider the processes and parameters of conveying the information you’ve gathered, you will create the slides to accompany your annotated bibliographies. Additionally, you will use the software YuJa to present/give more information than your slides contain, educating your audience (in this case, the TAs and me).

Please refer to the YuJa tutorial page (being entirely recreated because they have added some new items to YuJa that make it harder to navigate).

Your slides must contain the following:

• Title Slide
• Background Slide
  • This should introduce the topic and present what you’re specifically interested in understanding
• Body Slides
  • These slides should give some thematic focus. You will give short summaries on the slides and lecture over them, going more in-depth to guide your audience
• Hypotheses
  • Since you’ve read literature to help you understand your topic better, generate key hypotheses that you’d build from this literature.
  • This highlights your ability to apply the literature you’ve read abstractly
• Conclusion Slide
  • A summative point and idea on what you’d want to expand the literature to
• References Slide
  • Full citations for all references in APA format

An example of the presentation slides with notes about content. download

Rubric

Rubric

Rubric

Criteria	Ratings	Pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeTitle	7 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	7 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeBackground	10 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	10 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeBody	20 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	20 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeHypotheses	10 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	10 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeConclusion	8 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	8 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeReferences	5 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	5 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeLink/Overall YuJa Presentation	15 pts Full Marks 0 pts No Marks	15 pts
Total Points: 75

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