DocuLearns:
My Top 4 Small Assignments in the course:
Why I chose these 4 assignments:
- I chose the worksheet from the Spanhoff article, as I did thoroughly enjoy this assignment. In my previous courses, I have read academic articles, but I do not think I fully took the time to understand their methods and findings. However, with this paper, the worksheet guided me in deciphering the methods and findings of the paper, and I appreciated the work that had gone into the experiment much more. After this paper, I gained valuable reading skills for academic articles and did begin to find it much easier to navigate succeeding articles for this class and my other classes. It taught me how to analyze articles, and what questions to ask in order to understand more about the article, and the discussions I had with my group about this paper gave me an idea of what experiments researchers could base off this experiment to further explore the findings of a study.
- I also picked our group’s model for the honeybee case study, as I believe it was a fruitful collaborative effort that mirrors real research discussions. Although we had come into it believing that we had strong evidence that our papers had found THE explanation to honeybee caste differentiation, we were able to come up with one cohesive model that I believe is a plausible explanation for this phenomenon. This project required us to call on different mechanisms that we’d learned in this course and in previous courses, and use them in a creative way to explain a possible mechanism that is yet unknown. I believe this was a great achievement by our group, and I am proud of what we were able to accomplish.
- I chose the Lonfat et al. Article Analysis, as I believe it solidified the skills I had gained in reading academic articles. It was a little more challenging to read than our Spanhoff article, but it provided a lot of insight into new techniques that I am not completely familiar with. Additionally, it also helped me think more critically about articles by deliberating whether or not I agree with the findings of an article, instead of just accepting them as fact because they had been published. I also learned how to understand the purpose of figures, why these are important, and what they provide to the strength of an article’s argument.
- I included my preliminary final project question as well. Although this was a very early version of my final question that is quite different from my final question, I am proud of myself for coming up with a solid guiding question to direct my research proposal for the final project. It may not have been the most specific question, but looking back on it now, it is interesting for me to note the progression and evolution from this general question into my final project. After digging more through the literature and reading research that was published after this initial question was proposed, I was eventually able to specify my question to one candidate protein. This process has been something I’ve wondered about for some time in my undergraduate degree, and I’m very happy I was able to explore it further in this course.