teachandlearn. “On My Desk 2012: Day 17.” Photograph. Taken on January 17, 2012. https://www.flickr.com/photos/teachandlearn/6717612245/. Creative Commons license information.

One step that is often overlooked in the research process is reading the sources you’ve found. In your college career so far, you may have already encountered difficulties reading academic/scholarly sources. As we’ve discussed, they are generally written for experts, so it can be overwhelming to try to understand them if you don’t have the relevant background or expertise. For several reasons, reading an academic article from beginning to end the first time through may not the best strategy. In this module, we will think about strategies for making sense of scholarly journal articles.

This module consists of the following parts:

1. Read the article “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources”
2. Read and view the tutorial “Anatomy of a Scholarly Article” and complete the associated “Reading Scholarly Articles” activity
3. Take group notes on a scholarly article (asynchronous group work – 6 points)
4. Write a reflective Padlet post (individual work – 4 points)

Part 2 – Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources

Please read this post on “Predatory” Reading from Bowdoin University history professor Patrick Rael. This comes from a website made for history students, but this advice is useful for scholarly sources in many fields. Take note of things that might be useful to you when you are reading for research. You should read this first before proceeding to the rest of the activities.

From: Patrick Rael, Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College, 2004). https://courses.bowdoin.edu/writing-guides/

Note to instructors:

In the past, we’ve assigned the following OER chapter instead of the post on predatory reading:

Rosenberg, K. (2011). Reading games: Strategies for reading scholarly sources. In C. Lowe and P. Zemliansky (Eds.), Writing spaces: Readings on writing (Vol. 2, pp. 210-220). Parlor Press. https://writingspaces.org/?page_id=176.

Part 3 – Take Notes Together on a Scholarly Article (6 points)

This is a group reading strategies activity. However, you can complete this work on your own time, asynchronously, even though you will be commenting on the same document as your group members. Please make sure you follow the instructions below in order to get full credit for this activity. You need to make a minimum of 3 comments (described below) on this article in order to get full credit.

1. Open up the link to the assigned article. We do not want you to read the full article, but to employ some reading strategies from the earlier parts of this module.
2. Using some strategies you’ve read about, read/skim this article and make a minimum of 2 comments about any of the following (highlight the relevant section of text and leave your comment):
   • What sections of the article are the most important for your understanding of the content? Why?
   • What can you learn from the title of this article?
   • What can you learn from the list of authors of this article?
   • What is the main idea or argument of this article?
   • What keywords can you identify that are important to the understanding of this article?  
3. In addition to the above 2 comments, identify and make at least 1 comment on something that you don’t understand about this article.

How to annotate this article using Hypothesis

1. Click on the appropriate link below to join the Hypothesis group that corresponds to your group number for this course
2. Log in to your Hypothesis account (which you created back in the week 1 Orientation Module)
3. Return to this page and follow the link below to open the article. You should see the Hypothesis menu on the right side of the screen
4. Make sure to switch your Hypothesis settings from “public” comments to comments in your group (example: “LIBR100Fa22Group1”)
5. Highlight relevant text in the article and leave your comments

Group links

[group links here]

Link to the article

[link to assigned article here]

Note to instructors:

We use hypothesis for social annotation in this course. Hypothesis works only on publicly available websites, so this activity doesn’t work for articles behind a paywall. You can use hypothesis for this activity with an open access journal article of your choice.

Part 4 – Reflection on Reading Strategies (4 points)

Please post a 1-2 paragraph response to the following prompt on the Padlet:

We asked you to identify some things you didn’t understand in the article for this module. Describe a strategy you would use to help yourself understand one or more of these points. Reminder: we’ve covered a lot of tools and strategies so far in this course. Think about those, as well as your own past research experience, and draw on all those things to describe your strategy.

Be sure to include your name on your post to get credit for your work. Post on the embedded Padlet below or access the Padlet here.

Note to instructors: Padlet is a proprietary tool that we use through an institutional subscription. You can make a free account which allows you to make a limited number of Padlet boards at one time. You could also adapt this activity to be used with the message board or blog post system in your institution’s Learning Management System, or with another digital tool like Google’s Jamboard.

Acknowledgements

This module refers students to portions of the following resources:

• Wendy Hayden & Stephanie Margolin, Research Toolkit, Hunter College.
• Patrick Rael, Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College, 2004). https://courses.bowdoin.edu/writing-guides/

A previous iteration of this module used a chapter from the OER textbook Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing.