Autumn quarter

Components of a Problem

This workshop aims to help students critically assess data-driven research reports in order to write about social psychology research. Students learn to identify the components parts of an article, and to use these reading skills to compose concise and specific synopses about the article. Through this process, students will learn how to parse the form of argumentation in research reports, recognizing authors’ framing and points of emphasis, as well as how to organize their accounts around their own points of concern.

Use of Evidence

This workshop teaches students to recognize how data is mobilized as evidence in the articles under consideration, and how to use theories, hypotheses, and data from these articles to motivate and support their own arguments. Using their most recent discussion posts, students will reflect on how they represent authors’ arguments in their own writing and distinguish between their use of direct quotations, paraphrasing, summation statements, and their own, as opposed to the authors’, interpretive claims. By examining the relationship between theory and data, and the conclusions that relationship licenses, students will develop an understanding of reasoning in the empirical sciences and how to construct an essay using different sources and forms of evidence

Winter quarter

On Argumentation: Structure and Integration

Main claims are not always clear to writers when they sit down to start writing a draft. This workshop teaches students how to unite the various claims made at the level of individual paragraphs into a main claim. To this end, students will create a reverse outline in order to identify each paragraph’s substantive point, understand how the paragraph-level points fit into the larger aims of the paper, and evaluate the cohesiveness and coherence of the paper as a whole. The reverse outline helps students recognize how bringing together different sub-claims can add up to a main claim, generate new hypotheses, and/or expand a discussion of the implications of data used as evidence to support the claims made in the paper. Ultimately, students will learn to think of the main claim of the paper as a proposed answer to a problem the paper marks out.

Explaining Mind and Behavior at Different Levels of Analysis

As students begin to consider multiple articles in their writing, this workshop aims to build skills necessary to write comparative papers that answer a prompt. Students often latch onto the first answer to a prompt they think of, rather than considering how the research may be used as evidence for different claims. In this workshop, students are tasked with a preparatory writing assignment that will help them with organizing their thinking, so that they can formulate a thesis. The goal here is to underscore to students how writing is a process and that they should not immediately cling to a thesis, but rather focus on explicating various elements of the research in order to write about it.

Spring quarter

Just the Gist: Conveying the Essence

Extracting the critical components of an empirical argument is an essential analytic skill students have become adept at over the last two quarters. Conveying the crux of that argument to someone unfamiliar with it requires an additional set of skills. The goal of this workshop is for students to develop the skill of distilling a study to its essence so they can summarize it in a succinct yet comprehensible manner to an audience who has not read it to determine if enough information was given to understand the empirical reasoning in the paper, if any information is superfluous, or if more information is needed. Students will learn to consider: what does the research say that their audience doesn’t yet know, and how can they, as writers, convey just those elements necessary for the audience to grasp the research’s claims and the relevance of their evidence?

Integrating Sources for Coherence

Social psychology research and writing addresses a clearly articulated topic or issue and reviews relevant literature on that subject. As students move to writing their own research papers, this workshop develops the skills necessary to select a set of articles that are not only relevant to a research question about a topic, but that address the same or closely related aspects of the question. This workshop reviews sample final papers and discusses their strengths and weaknesses, in order to convey how to structure a paper around such a cohesive set of materials. Students learn how to identify when articles are truly in dialogue with one another, not merely tangentially related, and how to write about these relationships.