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COMM 301L: Empirical Research in CommunicationProject guidelines Writing a detailed summary of a research journal articleDue by Lab Assignment 2 Date (Check Syllabus for the exact date)For this assignment, at the top of a page, give the journal article’s information in APA style, and underneath that should be a 3 to 4 paragraph summary of the main points of this journal article in question. Try to cover the following information in the summary:- What was this article trying to do? What is the topic?- What are the research questions and/or hypotheses? What are the variables (both independent and dependent)?- What is the design (survey, experiment, or content analysis)? What are the specific procedures ( sampling; operationalizations of manipulations, measurements, etc.) - What did the author(s) find? What were the implications of these findings? - What were the limitations of the study? See the example of a summary to clarify.COMM 301L: Empirical Research in CommunicationProject guidelines Example of a detailed summary of a research journal article.Sanders, J. A., Wiseman, R. L., & Gass, R. H. (1994). Does teaching argumentation facilitate critical thinking? Communication Reports, 7(1), 26-35.This research study was designed to answer the research question given in the title: Does teaching argumentation facilitate critical thinking? Before this article, research on argumentation training focused on competitive debaters. One study had been done on students in regular argumentation classes, but the research did not use a longitudinal approach. This study did use a longitudinal approach.They were interested in effects of argumentation training on a number of variables. They hypothesized that argumentation training would lead to (1) increased ability to discern weak and strong variables, (2) greater argumentativeness (enjoyment of argumentative encounter), (3) increased need for cognition (cognitive elaboration), (4) more positive perceptions of arguing effectiveness, and (5) lower levels of verbal aggressiveness (attacking the person, not the person’s arguments). Ability to discern weak and strong arguments was operationalized by having students assess the effectiveness of several arguments that were rated as strong or weak by experts. The rest of the dependent variables were operationalized by responses to scales.They found that students trained in argumentation were better able to discern weak causaland example arguments, but no difference was found for strong arguments. They found that students perceived that they were better arguers (but they may not actually be) and they had a lower rate of verbal aggressiveness. Verbal agressiveness may be due to lack of argumentation skills. Argumentativeness and Need for cognition were not affected—perhaps these are more stable traits.The authors note that the study was limited to one semester; longer training may produce greater effects. Another limitation is that we don’t know how long the effects last (a month, year, several years). A final limitation is that “training in argumentation” can takea variety of forms, not just the ones used in this study.Future research should address the effects of longer training (2 or more semesters) or shorter training (will a one day workshop be effective?) . Also, we could look at the duration of the effects. How long do the effects last after the completion of the


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USC COMM 301L - lect5_5_Assignment2Guide

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