Reading and Analyzing Articles

Reviewing each chapter of Sowell’s book has given me more insight of how to evaluate journal articles and what to look for when reading each section of the articles. In return, I found these guidelines to be even more useful when it comes to writing my own article. I am able to write organize and develop my writing based on what the good article should be written. I will apply what I have learned from this book into my article writing for this class and for the future.

During the past month, we have discussed and analyzed methods, results, and discussion sections. In the first part of methods section, I found this section to be the most important section in terms of explaining the causation of your research design. It is very important for authors to clearly inform audiences who participants in the study are, how the study is designed, and what appropriate instruments are used to study constructs.

Regarding the subjects section, Sowell suggests that authors should describe population & subjects, sampling procedures, and sample sizes. I still need to keep it in mind that when I describe the subjects, I need not to mention institution’s name. This is considered irrelevant information because the study is designed to investigate the generally specific issue, not particular institution. I have learned that before describing the subjects, I should think about whether or not the information regarding subjects is important for the study and such information may have an effect on the study. For instance, indentifying whether subjects are undergraduate or graduate students may need to be clearly described in the article.

I found that determining what instruments should be appropriately used in my study is very challenging. The key of writing this section is to clearly inform readers whether or not instruments are appropriate for particular research problem. Therefore, it is important for to make sure to clearly describe validity and reliability of instruments being used.

Writing the results section gives authors chances to explain the possibly competing explanation. I have learned the take-home point from Dr. Grabowski that writing results section should be considered under TDT basis. TDT stands for “Teach-Don’t-Tell”. It is not necessary to teach readers how to calculate or what the formula is. So, the results section should be concise, but yet clearly answer the research problems.

I have learned that the discussion section is considered as a part of the idea of chain of reasoning. As a part of chain of reasoning, the discussion section should be written in the way that elaborates the findings. The main goals for writing discussion section are to state what authors found (answering questions / problems stated) and suggest what authors were to do in the future (recommendation for future studies).