Course-Based Research Assignments: Annotated Bibliography and Proposal to Support Thesis Research (Engl 598)

Abstract

I used a traditional short essay to check student skills in “primary research” (reading and interpreting texts to develop and support an argument). I then developed two new assignments, included here, to meet the range of needs and interests among my student group: a guided annotated bibliography assignment and a researched project proposal. The annotated bibliography assignment specifically addressed “understanding scholarly/artistic conversations” in the research/creative cycle. Because the main priority was for students to read and synthesize materials, rather than both find and analyze materials, I provided the majority of the readings and asked students to find only a couple of related articles (to prove that they could navigate database searches). Students targeted skills like identifying the argument, methods, and support in the articles they read; an oral presentation allowed them the opportunity to synthesize their readings into a cohesive sense of what the field as they know it represents on their topics. The main assignment of the course was a researched proposal assignment. Students could propose an essay on our course content or personalize the project either 1) to develop the research question, propose an argument, explain the scholarly conversation, and show enough primary research to plan their honors thesis or 2) to develop an artistic project, sense of artistic conversations and movements, and show enough planning of a creative project to prepare to write an honors thesis. As I reasoned to them (and myself): scholars evaluate academic proposals outside of our specific field areas all the time, and while this might require a bit more thought from me, it would ultimately be more useful to them to be able to plan their theses (especially in pandemic semesters). This proposal project was modeled on the UGRA proposal – to encourage increased student applications to the UGRA (and to remind them of a real, non-instructor audience) but also to give students experience thinking about grant writing, which could be potentially important to our graduates and job seekers.