How to do a Research Article Evaluation

Summary

In this video, Angela Macias explains how to effectively evaluate research articles, particularly for writing papers. She guides viewers through using a template to extract key information like the subject of the study, research methods, findings, weaknesses, and significance. Macias uses an example article, 'Funds of Knowledge for Teaching,' to demonstrate the process, showing how to take concise notes that can later be used in papers. She emphasizes understanding each section of a research article to ensure its relevance and quality before using it in academic work.

Highlights

• Angela Macias highlights the importance of using a template for research evaluations. 🗂
• The distinction between qualitative and quantitative research is explained clearly. 🔄
• Macias stresses the importance of identifying a study's findings and weaknesses. 🧐
• The video uses a real article example to walk through the evaluation process. 📄
• Macias warns against using articles with no significant findings relevant to your study. ⚠️

Key Takeaways

• Always use a template to organize research article evaluations efficiently. 📋
• Identifying the type of research (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed) is crucial. 🔍
• Understanding both the findings and potential weaknesses aids in critical evaluation. 📚
• Significance of findings should align with your research goals to ensure relevance. 🎯
• Effective note-taking helps streamline the writing process and supports later citations. ✍️

Overview

Angela Macias provides a thorough walk-through of how to evaluate a research article using a structured template. She explains each part of the template, showing how to fill in details like the study's subject, type of research conducted, data gathering methods, findings, weaknesses, and their significance. By doing this, students can organize their notes in a way that makes the information easy to access later when writing papers.

Using a sample article titled 'Funds of Knowledge for Teaching,' Macias demonstrates the evaluation process. She shows how to distill important details from the article and record them in the template. This process includes summarizing findings and understanding different research methods used, an important skill for anyone involved in academic research or writing.

Macias emphasizes the importance of evaluating the quality and relevance of research articles before using them in academic work. She provides tips on paraphrasing and note-taking to preserve original ideas while preparing for citations. The focus is on understanding each article's contribution to ensure it fits the student's research needs, with a reminder to seek help if needed during this process.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Research Article Evaluation The video provides guidance on completing research article evaluations, useful for students working on research papers. It mentions that a template may be provided for this task. The example used in the video is the paper titled "Funds of Knowledge for Teaching."
• 00:30 - 01:30: Filling Out the Template In this chapter, the process of filling out a template is discussed. It begins with a brief overview of the template, highlighting the essential fields that need attention. The chapter emphasizes starting with the title by clicking into the header to type it in, noting that it's typically used for personal reference notes. The text suggests that the user has discretion over the length of the title they wish to write, especially if the title is lengthy. Additionally, the handling of the authors' section is mentioned, implying it's for personal use.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Understanding the Study Subject The chapter titled 'Understanding the Study Subject' emphasizes the importance of referencing correctly, though it doesn't delve into full citations initially to save time. It highlights a methodical approach where one notes down the authors and the title first. The focus then shifts to understanding the guiding questions before diving into the text. This helps in identifying key elements while reading, suggesting a structured process for better comprehension and analysis of academic papers.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Types of Research Methods The chapter 'Types of Research Methods' introduces the reader to the key aspects of identifying the subject or focus of a research study. It emphasizes the significance of understanding 'who' or 'what' is being studied, as well as the context of the study, such as the subjects involved (students, teachers) and the location. The chapter hints at the foundational steps in the research process, fostering an initial awareness about the critical questions that shape a study's direction.
• 03:30 - 04:30: How Data is Gathered The chapter delves into the process of data collection, addressing key questions regarding the participants involved. It explores the different research methodologies used, specifically focusing on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. A brief explanation is provided about mixed methods, which incorporate elements of both qualitative and quantitative research, such as using surveys alongside focus group interviews.
• 04:30 - 05:30: Findings of the Study The chapter discusses the identification and understanding of mixed method research approaches. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing whether a study is qualitative or quantitative. For qualitative research, data is typically collected through interviews and observations, whereas quantitative research gathers data through test scores and surveys. Readers are encouraged to identify the type of study and explain the data collection process they observe.
• 05:30 - 06:30: Identifying Weaknesses This chapter discusses how to identify weaknesses in a study by analyzing the findings or results typically located near the end of an article. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing potential weaknesses but cautions against misunderstanding the significance of identifying these weaknesses. The chapter guides the reader to look for sections labeled 'findings', 'outcomes', or 'results', and suggests skimming through headings to become familiar with the structure of the study.
• 06:30 - 07:30: Significance of Findings The chapter titled 'Significance of Findings' discusses the inherent weaknesses present in all research studies. It emphasizes that no study is perfect, and being aware of these weaknesses is crucial for constructive analysis. The focus, however, should be on the significant findings that bolster your argument. Understanding the weaknesses helps in avoiding misplaced focus while ensuring that attention remains on the valuable insights derived from the study.
• 07:30 - 09:30: Analyzing the Research Article In this chapter, the author emphasizes the importance of focusing on the 'implications' or 'significance' sections of a research article. These sections provide a clear understanding of what the authors consider important about their study, thus minimizing the need for personal interpretation. However, it is also encouraged to add your own thoughts on how the study's findings relate to your specific research questions. This chapter includes a practical step where the author plans to share the article being analyzed.
• 09:30 - 10:30: Second Round of Research The chapter titled 'Second Round of Research' involves a collaborative approach to analyzing an old article. The protagonist highlights a few answers within the article and explains that despite its age, the article is being reviewed to expose the reader to the initial stages of a specific research field. The focus is on understanding who the early researchers were and how they conducted their studies. The narrative encourages reflection on the evolution of research in this field.
• 10:30 - 12:00: Review and Final Recommendations This chapter begins by detailing the initial scope of a study focused on Mexican communities in Tucson, Arizona. It notes that the research originally targeted these communities, highlighting its subjects from the very start. Furthermore, the chapter explains that the article contains two parts, with the latter half exploring a continuation of the study facilitated by a different group of teachers. The nature of the study evolved as it progressed, turning into a more extensive project than initially planned.

How to do a Research Article Evaluation Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello this video is going to go over how to complete your research article evaluations in your class you're probably doing some research for a paper and you may have been given a template by me to fill out even if this is not for your class and you're just using this at another time to write a paper it's still helpful so i'm going to go through a process with a paper that we're going to be using in our class called funds of knowledge for teaching and we're going to use that as an example so i'm going to share my screen
• 00:30 - 01:00 and show you the template first so here in this template you'll see there's a few things that it asks for in the very beginning of course first i'm going to put the title and we're going to just click in that header and type it in now this is typically for your own notes so it's up to you if you want to keep writing the whole thing if it's got a really long title i'm just going to leave it at that and then the authors this is for my own
• 01:00 - 01:30 reference again so i'm going to type the names but i'm not going to put the whole citation right now of course you could if you wanted to save yourself time later i'm not going to at this moment so i've got my authors and the title of the paper up there and now you'll see that it asks me a few questions and what i want to do is i want to get familiar with these questions first and then go and look at the text and see if i can identify those things as i read
• 01:30 - 02:00 through it and if you've already perused the text a little maybe you've skimmed it and you kind of found out some of these things from the beginning that might be easy for you to answer but i'm just going to take a look at them first the first one is who or what was the subject of the study that question is asking me who was being studied or what was being studied in this article so is it about students or teachers and and who and what and where uh was this
• 02:00 - 02:30 happening we want those kind of details about who is involved the next one asks what kind of research was conducted qualitative quantitative or mixed methods we've studied a little bit already about the difference between qualitative and quantitative but if you haven't heard of mixed methods it's exactly what it sounds like basically it's a type of study that uses a little bit of both so they might have given a quantitative survey but also chosen a focus group to do an interview with or something like that
• 02:30 - 03:00 so that that happens quite a bit and when you see that happening that's a mixed method so you should be familiar enough to know what kind it is and put your answer here and also explain how you how you know that how is the data gathered and that would that would relate directly to this previous question so if it's a qualitative study then the data might have been gathered through interviews observations things like that if it was a quantitative study they're probably maybe pulling test scores or doing survey results or things like
• 03:00 - 03:30 that the next question is asking what were the findings so usually you can find this in the end of the article near the end the author will have either a section labeled findings or something similar to that like outcomes or results of the study and so you might want to look at that and just kind of skim through ahead of time and look at those headings to get familiar the next question is are there potential weaknesses in this study now i want to caution you that this does not mean
• 03:30 - 04:00 that there's something wrong with the study or it's a bad article to use all research studies have weaknesses that is part of the game there is no such thing as a perfect study so you want to be aware of what those potential weaknesses might be because it helps you later on write about it you're not going to focus on the weaknesses you're going to focus on the important findings that do support your argument but it's important to the to know what those weaknesses are so that you're not focused on the wrong part of the article what is the significance of the findings this is the important part what is
• 04:00 - 04:30 the outcome that we should use often the author will include a section called implications or um significance and you'll see that at the end and this is where they're actually going to come out and tell you what they think is important about their study so you don't really have to do a lot of interpreting when it comes to that but you can also add your own ideas about how this is relevant to your research question so now i'm going to go ahead and share another window with you and that is of the article itself so we
• 04:30 - 05:00 can take a look at it together and see if we can find these things all right so i've already highlighted in my copy you see a few of the answers that i found as i just kind of reread this article recently so this is an old article and that's purposeful you'll see that we're reading this old one because in fact there's a lot of newer work on this but i wanted you to be exposed to the beginning stages of this kind of research and who was doing it early on and and how it
• 05:00 - 05:30 kind of later grew into a larger project so you'll see some of that in here you can tell from the very beginning here i've already highlighted some of the subjects of the study it says mexican communities in tucson arizona um so that's who they were studying in the first part of this now if you read this whole article you would see that this article actually is kind of a two-parter the second half talks about a continuation of the study where they had a second group of teachers that they they used to do
• 05:30 - 06:00 another round of the same kind of research so if you keep looking um you'll see a little bit more about some subjects later on but i believe it's pretty similar so they're uh often it looks like it may be a different city a different group of teachers but also focusing on their students in um in mexican-american communities so now that i know that right i'm going to put in my in my template and i'll put
• 06:00 - 06:30 this back up there for you in a moment the first part we have working class and this is just what the authors call it mexican communities in tucson arizona all right later on they actually kind of shift the focus from the students to the
• 06:30 - 07:00 teachers so i'm going to add later on i found teachers doing research in student households because i found that to be the second part okay let me just show you what i've done so far and you can see notice that this is a set of notes for me it's not meant to be detailed i can turn these into sentences later i can even when i've turned them into sentences i can go and i can copy and
• 07:00 - 07:30 paste them into my paper if i decide to cite this article i may decide that this is such a great piece of work that i want to include it in my annotated bibliography and later uh use it in my paper and so this is basically my set of notes that i'm going to use to later on organize myself when i'm going to do some writing so let me go back to the article again and let's see what else we can find the next question on my template was what kind of research was conducted and usually you'll be able to see that
• 07:30 - 08:00 very clearly laid out in this case the author says qualitatively very clearly right there that this is a qualitative study it talks about qualitative research in the methodological you know strategies they used to study these these families so these ethnographic observations open-ended interviewing uh strategies life histories and case studies so right here the author explained all of this to me in only the second paragraph and often
• 08:00 - 08:30 you will find that this is very common early in the article the author will tell you so now that i know that i'm going to go ahead and add that to my template all right so i'm gonna put qualitative and then i'm just gonna make a note to myself about how i know that um it said in there ethnographic observations which by the way means that you are among the community
• 08:30 - 09:00 basically in ethnography is is almost like living among the people to study them and so you're going into their homes and their communities and you're you're living among them as you take these notes and observe you're not just um reading about them or giving them a survey you're coming in to be among them for periods of time and and really take in a lot of the details about their their life so that's what an ethnography is and these are ethnographic observations because they went into their homes open ended interviewing
• 09:00 - 09:30 and i believe they say that because a lot of times interviews will be very focused and you might have a large number of people you interview and you're just looking for a few straightforward answers to see how many people will answer a certain way and you might even have a scale with which you determine what those answers meant but in general interviews are usually in qualitative studies and when they say open-ended that means that they went in maybe with some questions but
• 09:30 - 10:00 they really didn't have a specific direction it needed to go they wanted to let the conversation kind of lead its own direction whatever way it went whatever people want to share they ask open-ended questions that that allow for elaboration and the person to share all kinds of stories so they have life histories and case studies i'm going to go ahead and add that as well so they use a range of different sources of material
• 10:00 - 10:30 to put together their uh analysis of data so they didn't just take one piece they took several different types of data and put it together and so that's often what you see in qualitative research that's why the explanation and description of the of the data in a qualitative study is very long because they're taking several different types of information and they're synthesizing it we also note here that it says households um the people they studied
• 10:30 - 11:00 here these students are from households usually viewed as being poor they put that in quotation marks emphasizing that this is a label that they they don't like not only economically but in terms of quality or experiences for the child and they are addressing a very clear political stance here with this statement uh by explaining that they don't they basically don't agree with that they don't like this attitude um which is kind of deficit thinking and so hence this the whole purpose of
• 11:00 - 11:30 this study as you can probably tell by the title funds of knowledge is to explore what they do know not what they don't know we're looking at what is right about these families what positive things and learning that can happen at home not what they're not learning okay so so that's an attitude you can already gather from looking at how they describe their data here the next question how was it gathered okay so if we keep reading here we're going to see all kinds of
• 11:30 - 12:00 explanation that talks about how they basically sent anthropology researchers into homes and then trained the teachers but then later they took a group of teachers and worked side by side with the researchers and they found that to be a more beneficial process so there's actually two people doing this so i'm going to go back to my template here and i'm going to explain just summarize what i know i don't really need to quote anything i'm just going to summarize
• 12:00 - 12:30 um anthropologists and teachers observed and interviewed families in their community so that's a unique style of gathering data and that's what was happening here there's a lot more detail i could include um but for the sake of
• 12:30 - 13:00 of doing this quickly and just taking my notes and getting everything down i'm just going to go quickly let's look at the next question what were the findings okay so there's a couple places in this article that i can find that and often it's very clearly labeled right and you'll see some basic findings right here it's already clearly labeled right i highlighted a few things social history of households origins and development labor history of families and accumulated bodies of
• 13:00 - 13:30 knowledge of the household so that's some things that they learned so i'm going to put researchers found social histories labor histories and accumulated bodies of knowledge now notice that when i type this i'm kind of using some of their phrases but
• 13:30 - 14:00 i'm also paraphrasing others if i do decide to go and use this in my paper i'm probably going to come back to the original text and decide if i want to quote them directly or paraphrase them as i've been doing in my notes either way i want to appropriately cite them okay let me come back to this uh so you can see what i've put so far i'll just jump back here real fast so you can see uh what i've got in there so far is researchers found social histories labor histories and accumulated bodies of knowledge
• 14:00 - 14:30 um from families community in the community i should have a there there we go all right and then i'm gonna keep going because i know there's more here uh and i'm i know this is kind of a two-part study and actually if you keep reading you notice that this is from 1990 it's copyrighted 2001 but i think the original publication here it goes 1992. so this is an old one
• 14:30 - 15:00 but later on several years later they have a book that came out called funds of knowledge with these same authors where they actually continued the study and continued several rounds of this research and put it all together in a large book so this is the very beginning you're seeing here you can also see the the data is kind of laid out nicely in a little table often we see tables for quantitative but when we see them like this this is what tells you it's qualitative still because we're seeing descriptors right
• 15:00 - 15:30 sample of household funds of knowledge so these families knew a lot about agriculture they had some scientific knowledge um repair of you know so there's some some maintenance and repair some different uh different skills related to um to work and careers here uh medicine economics household management and religion so they gathered information about all these sorts of things okay um we can keep going here and see uh that the teacher in these home-based
• 15:30 - 16:00 contexts of learning will know the child as a whole person not merely as a student that actually sounds more like one of the findings as well so i'm going to put that in that same box teachers developed understanding of the whole student um and again i'm paraphrasing here uh but it's interesting to see an article where
• 16:00 - 16:30 one of the findings is actually what the teacher learned not what the students learned right and that's kind of the approach they took here they flipped it a little bit instead of just studying students um they studied teachers and what the teachers got out of it um so we can keep looking here and there's other details we could add about the community that they learned right here i highlighted some children in the households are not passive bystanders they seem in as they see them in the classrooms but active participants in a broad range of
• 16:30 - 17:00 activities mediated by these social relationships so we can put that related to this whole student idea we can add a little bit more um students or children actually probably a better term are active not passive that's a finding that they found in studying these households right here funds of knowledge for teaching so this
• 17:00 - 17:30 this goes on to add a little bit more this is kind of the significance i'm guessing because we're past the findings and now we're talking about how is this going to be used our analysis of funds of knowledge represents a positive view of households as containing ample cultural and cognitive resources resources with great potential utility for classroom instruction this view of households we should mention contrast sharply with prevailing and accepting perceptions of working-class families as somehow disorganized socially and deficient intellectually perceptions that are are well accepted and rarely challenged
• 17:30 - 18:00 in the field of education and elsewhere this is a pretty strong social stance they're taking social sociopolitical stance i should say as well and so we want to note that in the significance of this study that would be important to add so the findings you're also going to see some significance that you want to add what else was important about that that's my last column down here and i'll go back to weaknesses in a moment i'm just going to skip around because i just found this so let me go ahead and jump back to this
• 18:00 - 18:30 section and you'll see my uh my my template is a word document so it's going to keep expanding as i type in it and that's fine going to put funds of knowledge for teaching helps combat deficit thinking about working class families that's again me paraphrasing but if i
• 18:30 - 19:00 wanted to come back i could find it another smart thing i could do while i'm taking these notes if i see that that's an idea i definitely want to write about i could even give myself a little reminder as to where i found it and i might what i put might put page 134 next to that paraphrase that i've written just to remind myself that's where i want to go back and check if i'm going to write about that so there's another section i still need which is weaknesses right right here i've highlighted something that the authors chose to
• 19:00 - 19:30 share in analyzing our efforts however we realized that we had relied on researchers to present their findings to the teachers and to figure out the relevance of the information for teaching although we were careful about our desires not to impose but to collaborate with teachers this collaboration did not extend to the con to the conduct of the research in our work with teachers at least as far as household data were concerned we relied on transmission model we presented the information teachers
• 19:30 - 20:00 received it without actively involving themselves in the development or production of this knowledge so they're they're coming right out with the weakness and they're saying you know we messed up a little bit here in this first part of the study um it it maybe uh didn't go as well as we thought because the teachers were a little more passive than we wanted you can see here at the bottom of page 134 that's where i found that um so it goes on to talk about how they decided to correct that and they did another round of the study they
• 20:00 - 20:30 taught they gathered 10 teachers to participate again they gave them more workshops and trained them how to do their own field notes and observations um and then they went out and did another study okay so i might include some information on that here so let me go back to my template here of notes and we'll add that the first round research data was delivered in
• 20:30 - 21:00 a what's the phrase they used i like their phrase transmission model instead of collaborative the authors felt the teachers were too passive and with the second round [Music] of research they provided
• 21:00 - 21:30 more training teachers became collaborative researchers okay so that's what i gathered from that and i've added it in here so i can summarize that myself later if i decide to write about it i don't always need to write about the weakness of a study in my paper but it's important for me to know right um if i only read the beginning and i didn't read this far then i wouldn't realize that the
• 21:30 - 22:00 the study kept going right and that the authors were aware of a weakness and they kept going and they added a little more to it sometimes you'll find that in qualitative studies this especially they might see that there's a problem with the data and they might correct their methodology and continue they will they will continue in a new way they will add some piece of of new data that is going to counterbalance the weakness that they found so you will see that happen quite a bit in qualitative research so it's important to read the whole article to
• 22:00 - 22:30 make sure you get all the information so let's review what i've got here so i've got my title at the top my authors who are what was the subject of the study working class mexican communities in tucson arizona and also teachers doing research in student households i might go back and add if i really wanted to the details right i could put 10 teachers [Music] um and i could add whatever details i wanted i'll just put that there so you get the idea what kind of research was conducted i found
• 22:30 - 23:00 it was qualitative if you're not sure start flipping through the whole text and see what kinds of findings they present usually qualitative research is going to be presented in long descriptions and quantitative is going to be presented in numbers okay so just be aware of that and start looking for it if you're not sure usually like i said the authors will clearly label what kind of research it is and then you'll see these kinds of things listed if it's qualitative it's quantitative you'll see different kind of analysis done
• 23:00 - 23:30 how was it gathered anthropologists and teachers observed and interviewed families in their community if i wanted to go back and add a little bit more after reading the whole thing i could i could talk about how they did their observations what kind of field notes they took i could add more details but i have enough here to understand what it was about the next two what was the findings uh researchers found social histories labor histories and accumulated bodies of knowledge from families in the community and teachers developed understanding of the whole student children are active not passive
• 23:30 - 24:00 so these are all paraphrased important findings that i took from the article and you're perfectly welcome to paraphrase like that um i think that's totally fine you don't need to feel the need to um quote everything all the time right it's actually a good habit to get into to just find important stuff and put it in your own words especially in your notes the next one uh potential weaknesses we found that they did they did a second round of their research so i made a note of that and what they changed and then finally the significance of the
• 24:00 - 24:30 findings funds of knowledge for teaching helps com combat deficit thinking about working class families that definitely seem to be one of the significant pieces of findings but i also might add how the teachers used this information teachers implemented new teaching strategies and i could go into more detail about that if i wanted to um but this is enough okay so this is what you're going to be doing for our class um and i highly suggest that you hang on
• 24:30 - 25:00 to this template and use it in the future when you're doing any kind of a research paper and you pick out a study and you should be able to answer all these questions about a research article you are planning on you on writing about in your paper or citing uh even if you're just gonna paraphrase one little part you should be able to answer all these if you can't find the answers to some of these there's either there's one of two options one you didn't understand it and you missed it maybe go back and read it again or two they're not including it maybe
• 25:00 - 25:30 it's not a very good study just because you found it in a journal you found it on google scholar or wherever you got it the library does not mean it's a valid study you want to be very critical of this this is why it's called a research article evaluation were these findings important enough for the field that you're trying to research or not and if you find that this this last piece down here the significance of the findings is not really relevant to your study then you might ditch that article and not use it i know that seems kind of frustrating to do
• 25:30 - 26:00 a lot of reading and get to the point where you're going to now take notes and realize this isn't something good for my paper but it's better than adding it in there and having to take it out later so read the abstract read uh some of the headings get familiar with it read these questions again and see what you're looking for and then go through your article in detail and see if you can answer these that's what i would like you to be sure you know how to do when you're picking out your articles and please contact me if you have any problems with any part of that
• 26:00 - 26:30 good luck