Dissertation Writers: Dissertation Writers: Research Assessment Assessment Instructions:
Critical evaluation of a source requires locating the thesis statement. Note: You may wish to review the Anatomy of a Scholarly Article Campus page, linked in the Resources, which demonstrates where to locate the critical information in a scholarly article. The thesis statement will be the sentence or two that describes what your paper or presentation intends to prove. This differs from a hypothesis, which is used in experiments. For example:
· Thesis example: Heads-up displays should not be used in cars because they distract drivers from the road. Note: The thesis tells a reader what a paper or article will be about. It lets the reader know right away what the conclusion will be.
· Hypothesis example: We predict heads-up displays in cars will distract drivers from the road and cause more accidents. Note: The hypothesis provides a prediction (what will happen in the future) that can be tested in an experiment.
In our daily lives, we often conduct little experiments to detect cause-and-effect connections. If you are interested in gardening, for example, you might try adding plant food to one bed of flowers but not another, and then ask the question, “Does the use of plant food (the independent variable) affect the size of the flowers (the dependent variable)?” Your hypothesis might be: flowers that receive plant food will have larger and more blooms than flowers not receiving plant food. By comparing unfed plants (the control group) to those receiving plant food (the experimental group), you could then find out whether the plant food is worth using. To understand your results, you would also need to consider possible extraneous variables, such as differences in how much light both groups of flowers were exposed to, and how much water each group of flowers received.
Elaborate and discuss these statements in a detailed form.
