E-learning in a new era

Requirements: 

1. 250+ words of summary text

2. APA reference of your source

3. A link to the article so I may have access to it.

For this assignment, you will need to read and write a long summary for an academic article that is related to a research interest of yours. The academic article must be from an academic journal found through library resources. Also, it must be at least five pages or one thousand words long.

The purpose of this assignment is two-fold:

1) It gives you a chance to engage in research, early in the semester, that could be used for your research essays.

2) It allows you to practice a valuable set of skills necessary for academic writing including resource finding, interpreting complex material, and writing with an audience in mind.

Early on in this process, you’ll want to find a few different articles on a subject of your interest—don’t just settle for the first article you find.  Skim them; see what really interests you. Also, since this summary has to be about a page long, consider a longer article just so that you give yourself a fair amount of material to work with.

Once you think you’ve found something suitable read it a few times, marking important or memorable passages. Look for the main points, the thesis statement. Look for where paragraphs begin. Look for section headers or divisions. You may even find it useful to create an outline of the article before writing a summary. This is similar to taking apart a machine and putting it back together so that you might better understand it.

At that point, write a draft of your summary, focusing on those main points and important passages, especially. Re-read, see if you’ve missed anything, revise and you’re done.

Also, be sure to write your summary as if it came from the author. Avoid such language as, “In this article,” “the authors wrote that,” “I chose to summarize.” The author of an article would not write such things.

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Assessment Criteria:

In order to earn an “A” you must: 

Reflect all of the original article’s main points

Write a summary that is well-organized, coherent, and thorough

Create new, original sentences that do not hew too closely to the article’s –  a turnitin.com originality score of 15% or higher will not be accepted.

Create a proper APA reference for the article you’re summarizing

Provide a minimum of 250 words of text in the body of your summary

Produce a document with few to no minor grammatical and punctuation   errors