The Assignment
Each week you are assigned a reading summary presentation you are responsible for 3 tasks: 1) preparing a presentation that summarizes and analyzes the content in the week's reading assignment; 2) conveying that understanding to your peers who have not read the material either by delivering your own presentation or expanding on your classmates' presentation(s), answering questions from peers, etc.; and 3) facilitating discussion by engaging others by asking questions, posing puzzles, and the like.
Your grade on the reading summary presentation will be based on each of these 3 components whether or not you are called upon to share your presentation. In the sections below I have provided General Guidelines for Reading a Research Paper or Chapter and General Guidelines for Preparing Your Presentation, as well as an example that illustrates the kinds of answers to the readings questions that I am looking for in your work.
Reading assignments for RS #1:
• Appleby, Goss, Hutchison, Later: Leighley, Jan E. and Jonathan Nagler. 2012. "Demographics of Turnout", chapter 2 in Who Votes Now?.Typescript.
• Memik, Miragliotta, Paradero, Parks, Woods: Wichowsky, Amber. 2012. "Competition, Party Dollars, and Income Bias in Voter Turnout, 1980-2008." Journal of Politics. Vol 74(2): 446-459.
General Guidelines for Reading a Research Paper or Chapter When you are assigned a scholarly research article or chapter to read and assess analytically how should you approach it? The following set of questions can help guide your reading and should be addressed in your
presentation.
1. What is/are the research question/s?
• Specify what it is the authors hope to accomplish or learn.
• Identify the speci?c questions-in the form of questions-the authors address in the reading.
2. What argument(s) do the author/s make? Summarize the authors' causal theory.
• In most articles authors are writing because they believe they have the best answer anyone has (so far) come up with to answer the research question. Identify what the authors believe is the answer.
This is the theoretical story the authors believe underlies or causes the behavior of citizens/voters etc. If you are lucky this will be very direct with authors using language like "We argue..." or "We believe..."'.
• Sometimes authors suggest a set of possible answers to the question in the form of competing theories and in still other cases authors have no idea what is the answer to the research question and are just looking to see what they can learn.
What did the author/s do? Summarize how the authors tested their theory.
• Explain the type of data the authors used to test their theory. Was the data survey data, was it measured over time, within groups, etc.?
• How was the data used? Did the authors use cross tabs? Correlations? Something else?
What are the author/s' speci?c ?ndings? Summarize and discuss the results.
• What were the results of the tests using the data and how do they re?ect on the theory and research question?
• Be sure to spend time looking at the tables and ?gures. You may want to include key tables and ?gures in your presentation. You are to focus on presenting evidence from the readings that shows how they systematically analyzed the information they have.
5. What is/are the author/s takeaway points?
• What, in the end, did the authors learn about the answer to the research question?
6. What is your assessment of the research?
• Is there anything you would like to see given further attention in the article/chapter?
• Is there anything you think omitted from the discussion that might a↵ect the authors' research, especially their conclusions?
• Are there problems with the data? The theory?
7. How does research speak to topic of week and broader context of elections?
General Guidelines for Preparing Your Presentation
Once you have read the assigned material and thought through or jotted down your answers to the questions above, think about an e-ective way to share this information with the class.
The presentations serve two broad purposes: 1) to share the material and facilitate discussion of the research question(s) presented in the reading, as well as those I will put to the class and 2) to provide both substantive and empirical context for the data analysis and its discussion in the next class period. The following suggestions are intended to
help design your presentation.
1. You should be able to break the presentation down roughly one slide to each numbered point above. Point #4 will likely be the one (routine) exception to this rule.
2. As part of your summary and discussion of the authors' ?ndings (point #4), I encourage you to copy and paste ?gures, tables, or portions of them into your presentations.
3. Identify and ask your classmates a set of discussion questions-you can even create a short exercise for the class to do-to engage everyone on the topic.
4. Proceed slowly through your presentation!
5. You are welcome to identify supplemental material such as something contained in a link to a survey result, a video clip, or additional data, etc. that you think of relevance or interest to the research question or topic.
6. Keep in mind that many things in a presentation can put your audience to sleep:
• too many words crowded on a page
• only words on a slide