Lesson 3: The Four Rs - Part 1

Attention

You have likely heard of the 3 Rs in Education - Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic...the world of Social Sciences validates the importance of these but adds another...

The Four Rs of Social Sciences (i.e. skills that you need to develop while you are in this program) are:

Reading
wRiting
aRithmetic
Research

Part 1 of this lesson is going to focus on Reading, Writing, and Research - Part 2 will focus on Arithmetic!

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this lesson's material, students will be able to:

• Describe personal reading habits and "academic reading persistence and stamina."
• Identify personal skills and challenges to writing academic papers in APA format.
• Demonstrate strategies to locate "peer reviewed research" articles and Primary Sources for research in Social Sciences.

Teaching

Reading

In one of the Lesson Plans in this course you are going to learn about your Learning Style or Learning Preference. Different people learn in different ways...or better said, many people PREFER to learn in certain ways. The most common ways are VISUAL, AUDITORY, and KINESTHETIC.

In the Social Sciences MOST of what you learn will be learned through reading (which emphasizes the VISUAL and AUDITORY learning styles...i.e. not a whole lot of HANDS ON type work - though it does occur!)

To that end, this program requires that you develop strong reading skills. You not only need to be able to read accurately and comprehend what you are reading, but you have to develop what I call "academic reading persistence and stamina." The short definition of this concept is as follows:

Academic reading persistence and stamina is your ability to read COMPLEX, sometimes BORING, material for LONG periods of time, and still COMPREHEND and APPLY what you are reading.

When we touch on the Research R in this lesson you will encounter a type of article you will have to absorb (peer reviewed articles) that are NOT written for YOU...they are written for other professionals in the field.

Click HERE to read an article on how to TEACH reading persistence!

Writing

Another skill that is actually vital in the field of Social Sciences is writing.

Many people come to KVCC with a variety of writing skills, but the kind of writing that is expected in the workplace and in high school is very different than the kind of writing we require in the program.

In this lesson I want to introduce you to a writing style that is represented by the professional writing requirements of the American Psychological Association (APA). The style is simply known as APA Style.

Click on this image to visit the APA Style guides posted on Purdue University's Online Writing Lab website!

The details of this style are beyond the scope of this class and will be covered in EACH of the classes in your program that require writing. Suffice to say that APA Style mandates that you format your papers in a particular manner. Details of APA Style that you will become familiar with include:

• Formatting a title page.
• Essay writing.
• Expressing numerical data.
• Citing sources in your paper (in text citations).
• Creating a References page.

Click HERE to visit the KVCC Department of Social Sciences "Writing Across the Social Sciences" website. The resources in this website should help you get around the technical and stylistic requirements of writing in the program.

Research

The final area we want to cover in this lesson is Research.

There are essentially two types of research that you will do in this program:

• Type I Research - Research that looks at our current "fund of knowledge" in the field and reports on what we ALREADY know about a research question.
• Type II Research - Research that tests an hypothesis on real people and reports on the data that is collected from that process to answer a research question.

MOST of what you will do with be Type 1 Research.

Visit that same "Writing Across the Social Sciences" website and focus on the following topics to learn more about research.

Developing Good Research Questions

Using Google and other Search Engines for Research

Using your Textbook and Online Databases for Research

What is a Peer Reviewed Article?

Assessment

Lesson 3 Discussion A

Describe your personal reading habits and how you might set out to develop more persistence in reading complex and technical information. What experiences have you had in reading Peer Reviewed papers?

Reflect on how you might use two apps you have been introduced to so far, Notability and Cite This For Me in your college work.

Lesson 3 Discussion B

Locate a Peer Reviewed article using the Databases available through the KVCC Library. Download the full text PDF of the article. Read the article and compose a 1-paragraph summary (do not copy the abstract). In the discussion post your summary, an APA formatted citation of the article, and a PDF copy of the article itself.