Home

American Politics
You are free to choose a topic that most interests you as long as it is related to American Politics. I must approve of the topic. Email me your research question by 6/9th. Think of the political science topics that most interest you. Is there something you have always been curious about? Can you develop a research question out of that curiosity? For example, would you be interested in understanding more about the low levels of voting in the U.S.? Or are you more interested in comparative politics and want to compare the U.S. educational systems to another country?. Or are you interested in reducing gender violence and want to research why gender violence is so persistent? You are free to follow your interests but the topic must be related to American Politics. From there, develop a thesis, find evidence to support your thesis and write an outline that includes your introduction, thesis, evidence, and conclusion. What you are doing with this assignment is the actual research without writing up a paper. LET ME REITERATE THAT – YOU ARE NOT WRITING A PAPER. DO NOT HAND IN A PAPER. Rather, you are handing in AN OUTLINE THAT HAS ALL YOUR RESEARCH FINDINGS AND AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY. You will spend hours reading everything there is to read on this topic. You will present your research findings to me in the form of an outline and you will put your sources in a proper APA formated annotated bibliography (Reference list). The focus of this project is helping you learn how to do research. The annotated bibliography is something researchers often use to summarize the sources they find when they are doing research. You will turn in to me a list of your sources (using APA format for the bibliography) and under each entry, you will provide a short summary of the source. Here are some great sources to help you do an annotated bibliography:
Sample annotated bibliography:
https://library.tiffin.edu/annotatedbibliography/e…
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_…
Remember: Develop your own thesis and back up your argument with concrete examples, statistics, and quotes from your research. Research Process:
Once you have chosen a research topic (which you should always be able to say in the form of a question), you will now begin the research process. I want you to become a mini-expert on this topic. Read all there is on the topic. You can read newspaper sources, online sources (if reputable), books, articles, etc. Use the library databases and Google Scholar. You should have used at least ONE peer-reviewed, scholarly source. As you are reading, collect and begin to form a bibliography of sources that are good ones for your purposes. Once you have done that, you should begin to start forming a thesis. In other words, after reading and looking at the evidence and arguments related to your question, you should form your own thesis based off of all of this evidence. Once you have a thesis, you will begin to develop an outline. Typically, you will have an introduction of which your thesis is usually stated towards the end of that introduction. You will need to provide evidence (quotations, statistics, case studies, logical reasoning, or examples that you found while researching) in your outline to support your thesis. I want your evidence to be cited in the outline. Use in-text citations to do that in APA format. The reason you do that is you never want to separate any evidence you find from its source so you should get in the habit of always providing a citation – even for yourself as you do the outline. What I will consider when grading:
Is it written free of spelling and grammatical errors? (5 points)
Does the outline have a thesis? Is the thesis focused narrowly enough? (10 points)
Do you provide evidence for your argument? Did you read a variety of sources in order to find good data, quotations, case studies, etc. to back up your thesis? (30 points)
Did you cite your evidence in the outline using APA format? (10 points)
Did you create an annotated bibliography of your sources and put it in APA format? Did you use at least 8 sources, one of which is from a peer-reviewed scholarly source? (20 points)