Intelligence and the Justice System

If you are interested in a discussion on intelligence and how it relates to the justice system, I highly recommend listening to this particular episode of the podcast Undisclosed: State vs. Rocky Meyers - Episode 4.

Book Review - Savage Inequalities

Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools is one of those books that may be older, but shows us that the more things change, the more things stay the same -- particularly in educational inequality. 

The review is here: 

https://sassypeachreads.blogspot.com/2016/10/savage-inequalities-children-in.html

Book Review - The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog

Over on my book blog, I reviewed one of the most profound and affecting books I have ever read. It remains with me to this day, and it started my journey down the research rabbit hole on trauma. I highly recommend it, and I hope you find it as important as I do. 

Link here: http://sassypeachreads.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-boy-who-was-raised-as-dog-and-other.html

APA Style Notes

This is a quick tip sheet on what I am looking for regarding APA style for your papers. 

The first thing, and most important thing, that I care about is your references. Make sure all of the references in your literature review are in your references list at the end of your paper. Never list a reference you haven't pulled, made sure is accurately represented in your paper, and is in your references list. 

There is no things as citing too much. If you are using someone else's idea, cite cite cite. Even if it feels like you are citing every sentence. You probably are, and that's OK. 

IN-TEXT CITATIONS 

In-text citations should read in one of two ways. If you are introducing the author in the body of the sentence, it should read something like this: 

• Lorenzetti (2019) states that.... (for one author)
• Lorenzetti and Tillman (2019) state that... (for two authors -- be sure to use the word and as opposed to an ampersand [&])
• Lorenzetti, Tillman, and Palmer (2019) state that... (for three to four authors)
• Lorenzetti et al. (2019) state that... (for five or more authors ONLY)

If you are putting the reference at the end of the sentence, it looks like this, with the period coming after the parentheses: 

• Because I said so (Lorenzetti, 2019). (for one author)
• Because we said so (Lorenzetti & Tillman, 2019). (for two authors -- note the ampersand [&])
• Because we said so (Lorenzetti, Tillman, & Palmer, 2019). (for three to four authors)
• Because we said so (Lorenzetti et al., 2019). (for five or more authors ONLY)

REFERENCES PAGE

All of your references should be uniform, with a hanging indent. They should read like this (but with a hanging indent, which is hard to do on a blog):

Last name, first initials with a space between each letter (year of publication). Title of article with only first letter capitalized: Subtitle of article with only first letter capitalized. Journal Name in Italics with All Words Capitalized, Volume(Issue -- non-italicized with no space between volume # and start of parentheses), encompassing page numbers with numbers only.

Lorenzetti, N. L. (2019). One-hit wonder: This is the best article you will ever read. Journal of Awesome Articles, 86(2), 332-335.

Lorenzetti, N. L., & Tillman, W. A. (2019). (For more than one author -- make sure that you put a comma after the first author even if there are only two authors. Use the ampersand here.)

QUOTES 

Avoid quoting when possible. You should only quote when you absolutely cannot put it in your own words. My rule of thumb is no more than one quote for every three pages of (double spaced) writing. Otherwise, it's not your work, but rather a copy-and-paste job. 

If you do choose to quote, you will need to edit your citations: 

If you start your sentence with referencing the authors, you will just need to end your sentence with the page number of the quote: Lorenzetti (2019) states that "chocolate chip cookies are the best" (p. 3). Note that the parentheses with the page number goes outside of the quotation marks and the period goes at the end of the parentheses.

If your reference is at the end of the sentence, your will add your page number to the end of the parentheses: "Chocolate chip cookies are the best" (Lorenzetti, 2019, p. 3). Note that the parentheses with the citation goes outside of the quotation marks and the period goes at the end of the parentheses.

OTHER NOTES 

If you are submitting your work to me electronically, please make sure your name is on the document, not just in the email you send me.

No footnotes or endnotes.

Review some of the Paper Writing Tips I have on the blog -- you will find them helpful. 

How to Read an Academic Paper for Class

I'm going to take some time to touch base on how to read an academic article. Please note that these tips are specific to my courses; if you are reading this blog post from another course or another institution, your professor may have other thoughts as to what they would like you to glean from the readings they assign. 

This is specifically aimed toward reading empirical studies, which are studies that have a Method section and a results section that examine data quantitatively, or using statistics. Qualitative studies (that is, descriptive studies) and white papers (which are laying out a theory as opposed to presenting data) are different and are, in my opinion, a little bit easier to read for the non-statistician. 

One of the many reasons why I prefer for you to read articles instead of textbooks is that I want you to see what's happening out in the world and relate that to your own experience. This being said, the most important parts of the article for my theory courses (research courses are a different story!) are the literature review and the discussion section. 

The abstract is a quick summary of the article -- since you will be reading the article anyway, this is something you can skip for the time being. 

I suggest you start with the literature review. The purpose of the lit review is to summarize what has already been done in relation to the theme, research question, and hypothesis of the article. Hopefully the authors have done a good job of capturing the big themes and the relevant research. Underline words you don't know -- this is completely normal. Unless you are a wizard in academia, these articles will use words that you are unfamiliar with. Don't beat yourself up if you have a hard time understanding a sentence or two -- make a mark next to it, keep reading, and see if you can grasp the meaning from context clues. 

Remember -- you can always ask in class what something means. If you didn't understand it, chances are very high that other people didn't understand it as well. This is a learning process, and there is no shame in your not-knowing game. 

The end of the lit review should contain the research questions for the study (which the lit review justifies) and the hypotheses, which should be directly related to those research questions. 

Next, in the Method section, see if you can get an idea of who the sample was -- age range, sex and/or gender, location of the sample, racial and/or ethnic breakdown. You don't need to memorize this, but it's a good thing to put in the back of your head as you try to get a good idea of what the results of the study mean. If you'd like to read through the measures described in the Method section, go for it! Again, though, don't beat yourself up if you start to find this section confusing. 

The Results section is going to be the hardest to read. You are most likely not a statistician, and the description of the tests and the outcomes might be on the difficult side. This is something that you may very well want to gloss over and head on down to the Discussion section. 

The Discussion section begins with a one paragraph overview of the study. This is a great reminder of what it is the authors were looking for in the first place. Following this will be an overview of the results. It won't be nearly as technical as the Results section, which also means you won't have as much detail. However, for the non-statistician, it's much more clear to read. Also in this area you will have some interpretation of the results, put into the context of the lit review at the beginning of the paper. This section is important to read.

At the end of it is often (but not always!) a conclusion section. This comes after the limitations (there are always limitations to a study -- no study is perfect) and the future directions (because we always have more to learn!). This is a great place to be reminded about everything you just read put into one succinct paragraph.