Final Thoughts
Even though this class was held on-line, I found it to be useful in helping me become a better writer. From this class, I take away the knowledge that I can write something that is good, if I put my mind to it. From the reading assignments, I have become more aware of the way I write and how I structure phrases and sentences. I have learned even if it takes an hour or two proofread, proofread, proofread. (It comes in handy!)
The exercises from class I found to be the most valuable were the grammar exercises, paraphrasing exercise, and the rough draft. I would keep all of these assignments in the course. The grammar exercises are good review of what you learned long ago. The paraphrasing exercise helped me put into perspective what others outside my discipline may not understand. It also made me realize that I do not have to quote everything. Writing a rough draft and getting feedback is always excellent.
The assignment I disliked the must was the annotated bibliography. I understand annotated bibliography help you investigate sources and plan how you will use the source, but I do not like writing them. I think a good assignment instead of an annotated bibliography is to get the students to pick quotes from sources and explain how they will use the quote in their paper. This provides them with a resource for the source and the quote when it comes time to write their paper.
I have thoroughly enjoyed this class. For the first time on-line, I feel the class was spaced out with enough time to do assignments and focus on the readings. A suggest for teaching next time is posting assignments for the week. For example, we had 2 units per week; post both units at the beginning of the week. I make this suggest because I had another class going on at the same time and I was always worried about when you were going to post the next unit. I did not want to miss due date or assignment. In addition, posting the whole week can help with those that work full time jobs. It provides those individuals with an opportunity of how to schedule their week.
Something I think you should continue is how you critique our work. It was easy to understand what you were addressing. It was also easy to remove your comments. Thank you are not using tracks. When professors use tracks it is so confusing to get your paper back to the original. Your way works, so continue to use it.
Uncategorized | Comment (1)My biggest frustration in the research process is combining words to get the best results. Over the years, speech-language pathologists have changed the names of disorders because they are too similar to the name of another disorder. My topic of research is childhood apraxia of speech; however, it is also known as developmental apraxia of speech, dyspraxia, and developmental verbal dyspraxia in the literature. When I researched a treatment, I had to search all names used to classify the disorder. I know everyone has their own perspective, but a unified term should be used across the board.
An obstacle I am having when locating articles is there is not enough research on my topic. Recently, childhood apraxia of speech diagnoses is on the rise. There is no clear understanding about the cause of childhood apraxia of speech and research is lacking on the efficacy of treatment for childhood apraxia of speech in the literature.
I feel I understand the literature related to my topic. I have previously taken Dr. Stephen Keith’s research class at Longwood. Dr. Keith’s class helped me to understand terminology in journal articles. The one thing I took away from his class was how to understand the results of research paper pertaining to statistical significance and coefficients. Dr. Keith’s class is a great class to take, if you like to do research, but I must forewarn you, it is a tough class.
Finding time to adequately work on this paper has been tough. I have three intense summer classes going on at the same time. I have been trying to figure out all week how I am going to get everything completed. When I think I had it all figured out, life threw me a curve ball and I had to reassess the situation.
Uncategorized | Comment (1)Scholarly vs Non-scholarly
Non-Scholarly
http://people.umass.edu/velleman/cas.html
Even though this website is a .edu, it is a link off a faculty/staff website. It is a letter to parents explaining childhood apraxia of speech. The website uses very general information with no citations. The website does not provide a date of publication, nor does it state when it was last updated. I was able to view the homepage of the faculty/staff member. The homepage was able to identify the author for me; however, I noticed the author cited a list of selected publication, which her name appeared numerous times.
Scholarly
http://search.asha.org/query.html?col=ebp&col=journals&col=policy&qt=childhood+apraxia+of+speech&charset=iso-8859-1
This website is scholarly because it is from the national accredited organization entitled the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. All speech-language pathologist and audiologist around the United States recognize the information on this website. The above website is the link to the search page. This website was able to give me the author’s names, dates of publications, and online, scholarly journals where articles can be found. All material on the ASHA website has been approved to be published by a committee. The search results published on this website are results from published journals. I feel this website answers all of the wh- questions about how to evaluate a source. When doing research in my discipline, you always start with ASHA.
Uncategorized | Comment (1)