Here I provide an introduction to my Research Paper Assignment and links to the relevant blog posts that served as part of my writing process.
The topic of my research paper was developed from the 2016 documentary film Where to Invade Next by Michael Moore. In the film, Michael Moore interviews people of all different countries in order to gain insight on how their societies work and compare them to America’s government system. I have included a full summary of the film in my blog post Summary and Rhetorical Analysis of Where to Invade Next. There were many interesting topics to choose from, but I thought Finland's education system was something I wanted to write about. When Michael talked to Finnish high school students, they said they had no standardized tests and rarely saw multiple choice questions on exams. This is very unlike America's education system because we use the SATs to gain college admission. I believed I could make a very compelling argument from this topic that standardized tests should be eliminated. Other topics I was thinking about writing are included in my blog post Where to Invade Next? An Argument.
My classmate, Candace Stoltzfus, was researching the same topic as me and we decided to write the paper together. Our arguments were very similar so we were able to compose our first draft on Google Docs. We also met up in person to revise our paper in order to make a stronger argument.
While I was doing my research and writing my blog post with an Annotated Bibliography, I noticed two reasons as to why the SATs are not effective. The first reason is that critical thinking skills are not developed when students take multiple choice exams. Another reason is that the quality of teaching is decreased because educators are required to base their curriculum on standardized tests. Candace and I decided to make this the focus of our argument.
For our second draft, Candace and I met at the Learning Commons and revised our paper to make a second draft. We noticed that the first sentence of each paragraph was not tied directly to our thesis statement. After we re-wrote our topic sentences, we rearranged paragraphs and ended up cutting over 200 words from our paper. Some of the paragraphs were very repetitive so we decided to combine them into one. Candace and I were able to make our paper much more organized compared to the first draft. The blog post Research Paper Process Reflection also helped us determine the areas of our paper that we needed to work on.
For our third and final draft, Candace and I made revisions based on the comments of our professor. Some paragraphs needed more elaboration to make the argument stronger. We also cut down on material that was not very relevant to our paper. In addition, the conclusion ended too abruptly in the second draft so we integrated the narrative from the beginning of the paper with our final paragraph. If I were to work on this paper more, I would include more counter-arguments and refute them. There are many people that do not want standardized testing eliminated and I think refuting their claims in our paper would make it a lot stronger. Co-authoring with Candace was a very good decision and I think our final paper turned out well.
The topic of my research paper was developed from the 2016 documentary film Where to Invade Next by Michael Moore. In the film, Michael Moore interviews people of all different countries in order to gain insight on how their societies work and compare them to America’s government system. I have included a full summary of the film in my blog post Summary and Rhetorical Analysis of Where to Invade Next. There were many interesting topics to choose from, but I thought Finland's education system was something I wanted to write about. When Michael talked to Finnish high school students, they said they had no standardized tests and rarely saw multiple choice questions on exams. This is very unlike America's education system because we use the SATs to gain college admission. I believed I could make a very compelling argument from this topic that standardized tests should be eliminated. Other topics I was thinking about writing are included in my blog post Where to Invade Next? An Argument.
My classmate, Candace Stoltzfus, was researching the same topic as me and we decided to write the paper together. Our arguments were very similar so we were able to compose our first draft on Google Docs. We also met up in person to revise our paper in order to make a stronger argument.
While I was doing my research and writing my blog post with an Annotated Bibliography, I noticed two reasons as to why the SATs are not effective. The first reason is that critical thinking skills are not developed when students take multiple choice exams. Another reason is that the quality of teaching is decreased because educators are required to base their curriculum on standardized tests. Candace and I decided to make this the focus of our argument.
For our second draft, Candace and I met at the Learning Commons and revised our paper to make a second draft. We noticed that the first sentence of each paragraph was not tied directly to our thesis statement. After we re-wrote our topic sentences, we rearranged paragraphs and ended up cutting over 200 words from our paper. Some of the paragraphs were very repetitive so we decided to combine them into one. Candace and I were able to make our paper much more organized compared to the first draft. The blog post Research Paper Process Reflection also helped us determine the areas of our paper that we needed to work on.
For our third and final draft, Candace and I made revisions based on the comments of our professor. Some paragraphs needed more elaboration to make the argument stronger. We also cut down on material that was not very relevant to our paper. In addition, the conclusion ended too abruptly in the second draft so we integrated the narrative from the beginning of the paper with our final paragraph. If I were to work on this paper more, I would include more counter-arguments and refute them. There are many people that do not want standardized testing eliminated and I think refuting their claims in our paper would make it a lot stronger. Co-authoring with Candace was a very good decision and I think our final paper turned out well.