Instructions: Note that you must select one article from this List of Articles. Post the full citation to the Discussion Board for Week 3 Each of you must reivew a different article. The person who states his/her choice first gets the article when there are two or more people who would like to review the same article. I suggest you make your choice as soon as possible.

How can you spot a "good article" -- worth your time -- versus a "bad article" not worth your time?

I want you to learn to read less, not more, and to be selective about what you read. Most students, in my experience, are prone to reading every article that "seems interesting" to them and also seem to feel that you have to read every word in an article to make use of the article in their work. Read the following materials available at the course website home page. Click Documents by Swisher -- Including the SYLLABUS. I want you to read Deciding What to Read and What Makes a Good Contribution to the Literature. For now, Deciding What to Read is the critical resource. It will help you make good selections about which articles are most valuable to you.

Spend no more than about 15 or 20 minutes on this decision-making process.

Pick three to five articles that seem interesting to you. Read the abstract for each article and fill out the Abstract Evaluation Form. Based on the scores in the abtract evaluation form, narrow your choices to a maximum of three articles.

SKIM each of these three articles very quickly. Your only objective is to decide whether each article seems worth reading in detail. Based on how you scored the abstract in the Abstract Evaluation Form, you think it is a "good read". Now you have a second opportunity to reject spending your precious time reading the article in detail.

Start with the justification and statement of the research question and objectives -- usually found in the first few paragraphs of the article, the introduction. The author should state the problem to be addressed, make a good case that it is important, state the research question and tell you what s/he hopes to add to what we knoe about how to address the problem.

Do not read the methods section or the results in detail. At most skim through them quickly. These dense parts of the article deserve your attention only if you decide the article's overall content is of good value to you.

Go to the discussion and/or conclusions sections of the article. Read these sections quickly, looking for key ideas. You need to decide whether the author "delivered" the contributions to the literature that s/he talked about making in the introduction. If I tell you as an author that my objective for the research was to understand how community support contributes to resiliency among underprivileged children, I should be able to explain the relationships between community support and resiliency in the discussion and I probably sould be able to make some suggestions for practice (how to use what I learned) and for future research (what we still do not know) in the conclusions.