Faqryza Ab Latif
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
The goal of the activity is for learners to be able to describe the components that make up the abstract of an empirical social science paper and apply them to other abstracts in the field. This goal is connected to introducing students to the conventions of an abstract. For the activity, students will be asked to read the abstract of an assigned article and reflect on the purpose of each sentence in it. The instructor will then introduce the 6 components of an abstract using a color-coded chart, where each color represents a different component. In groups, students will go back to the abstract of the article and identify the sentences that correspond with each component. A follow-up task aimed at assessing students’ understanding is to assign different abstracts and have students decompose them. This activity is suited to take place earlier in the semester for a lower-division social science course, so that students can learn about the conventions of empirical social science articles before being assigned articles to read throughout the semester.