What Can I Learn on This Page?
You can learn to:
Value reliable information and sound reasoning,
Integrate references to other sources meaningfully into presentations.
Use practices for citation, credit and acknowledgement to respect the work of others while presenting your own work.
Use what you learn from your sources to construct your answers to your questions.
Use Your Sources to Build Your Answers
Be sure to allow plenty of time to go through your selected sources. The Assignment Calculator can help you plan your work. See Learning and Research Take Time.
In reading your sources be sure to remain aware of the author's qualifications, the nature of the audience the author is speaking to, and the usefulness of the source for answering your question. Review the Evaluate Your Sources Guide.
Use your sources in a transformative way. Try to summarize instead of paraphrase. Avoid collecting bits of pieces of information that seem to support your existing idea or opinion. Look for an answer to your question that you haven't thought of yet. See Deep Reading and Note Taking.
Additional Tips and Guides
- Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical FallaciesWhen something doesn't seem quite right about claims that a source is making, or that you want to make, the problem is often in a defective line of reasoning, also called a fallacy. This interactive tool explains two dozen fallacies.
- How to Read and Understand a Scientific PaperA step-by-step guide for non-scientists (on HuffPost) written by Jennifer Raff, a Professor in Physical Anthropology at the University of Kansas with a joint PhD in genetics and anthropology.
- Correct CitationsThe Correct Citations page provides the key concepts on how to cite your sources and a link to additional information on citation styles and tools.
