Developing critical thinking

You will select four recent (< 10 years old), peer-reviewed journal articles on the topic you have been writing about in this course.

The articles selected should be related to each other in terms of focus so that, together, they tell a “story” about the topic. You should include the two articles you used in the concept map assignment, plus two additional articles. The findings of the articles do not necessarily need to be consistent, but there should be coherence among the articles.

For each article, copy the abstract from the article. For your annotation of each article, summarize the key points, findings, and/or conclusions that are of particular importance to your topic. In particular, include factual information (e.g., the method and results of a study) as well as your own impressions (e.g., the credibility of the source, strengths and limitations of each study, and how the article informs or is helpful to your work/research)). In other words, you will both summarize and evaluate each article that you annotate. Among the four articles, you must include an article that shows contradictory findings/conclusions or presents a different perspective from the other three articles.

After all articles have been annotated, synthesize the findings/conclusions of the articles. See “Annotated Bibliography Example” in Blackboard for more details on writing the synthesis as well as the format for the annotated bibliography.