The written assignment component of POSC 1000 consists of the preparation of a critical review of a scholarly article published in a political science journal. What is a critical review? Its a short analytical summary of an article chosen from an approved list of works in political science. The goal of this assignment is to help students develop their skills as consumers of political science scholarship, while at the same time getting students accustomed to independent study on selected topics in the field. Basically, you will be reading a political science article and then making your own observations about it.
The guidelines below describe specific requirements concerning the format and structure of the reviews. You must choose an article for this assignment from the list of articles provided. No other articles are acceptable: there are no substitutions. You are required to write on ONE of the articles; you should NOT write about more than one. In preparing the assignment, you must also follow a specific structure, described below (under Structure).
Article chosen:
“Puddister, K., & Small, T. (2020). Trial by Zoom? The Response to COVID-19 by Canada’s Courts. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 53(2), 373-377. doi:10.1017/S0008423920000505”
Each review must be 4 typed, double-spaced pages in length. One of the major goals of this assignment is to enhance your ability to summarize political science research concisely (that is, briefly and efficiently), therefore the overall length guidelines for this assignment will be strictly enforced. This means that, in grading the assignment, any text after the 4th page of your critical review will not be considered or evaluated.
Formatting
Critical reviews, as noted above, must be 4 typed, double-spaced pages in length. Please also follow the following formatting rules: the paper must be typed in 12-point font; paragraphs must not be separated by extra lines (double-spacing between lines is enough, so just hit the enter key once when you finish a paragraph); all margins must be 1; and pages should be numbered. Note that title pages are not required. Please indicate your name and student number at the top of the first page of your paper, as well as listing the author(s) and title of the article you have chosen to review.
You have been provided with a Microsoft *.doc template for the assignment, it includes section-headers and appropriate margin formatting, as well as page numbers. Feel free to use this template. If you do not use the template, please be sure to adhere to the formatting requirements (e.g. the assignment should look as if you DID use the template).
Citations and References
Unlike a regular term paper or essay, a list of references (bibliography) is not required for this assignment. Please simply list the author(s) and title of the article you are reviewing, at the top of your assignment, under your name and student number.
While a reference list is not required, you are required to use citations to the article you are reviewing, whenever you want to include a direct quote, make note of a specific argument, or refer to a specific piece of evidence from the article. Basically, when you are explicitly referring to the articles content, you should explicitly cite the article. In order to help you to apply this rule correctly, the following guidelines may be useful:
A) In general, you should not use long quotes. The object of the assignment is to prepare an analytical summary of the article which means that, whenever possible, you should work to restate and condense (or summarize) the article’s claims in your own words. Quotes should typically only be included if the author has a particularly poignant, distinctive or useful way of expressing a certain idea, one which you feel cannot be restated.
B) It may be tricky to determine if a particular argument or piece of evidence you are citing is sufficiently specific to merit a citation. One way to deal with this is to ask yourself the following question: will the reader of my critical review have difficulty figuring out where I got this particular argument or piece of evidence? If the answer is yes, then you should include a citation.
C) Bear in mind that learning to cite properly is not a major goal of this assignment. You should (of course) aim to do this properly, but an extra or missing citation or two (or three or four!) is not going to hurt your mark a great deal. So, imperfection is ok, but keep in mind that you should not be citing a page reference for every sentence of your assignment, nor should reviews include no citations whatsoever.
For this assignment, students must use the citation style of the student journal Mapping Politics, the MUN Political Science Departments student-run journal, available at journals.library.mun.ca/MP/mp_styleguide.pdf
Structure
Your review must be prepared according to the following structure. The review will consist of five sections, as described below, and each section should be titled by the corresponding heading. The page lengths indicated in parentheses (next to each heading below) should be treated as approximations; you may allocate slightly more or less to each section without penalty. If you are using the assignment template provided, these section headings and the instructions for each section are included. Simply replace the instructions with your own text.
Overall summary ( page)
You should complete this first section of the review last, if only because youll find the work much easier at that point. Here you should provide a concise summary of the entire article, including its thesis. In practice, this summary could easily be composed of a restatement of each of the remaining sections of the assignment (except for the Problem section). That is, one approach would be to include one or two sentences summarizing each of the Background, Major claims and evidence, and Conclusions sections.
Background (1 page)
In this section you will discuss the background or context of the article. Consider questions such as: why has this article been written?; what are the general questions or issues the article is addressing?; what is the importance of the articles conclusions to politics and political science?; what other relevant research has been completed on the topic?; have other researchers arrived at different conclusions from those of the present author(s)? Keep in mind that, when addressing these questions, it is not necessary to go beyond the article at hand. All the articles will supply information, albeit to varying degrees, on the relevant background.
Major claims and evidence (1 page)
In this section you will identify the major supporting claims made in the article, along with the evidence the author supplies in support of those claims. These are the sub-arguments the author provides to support his/her thesis, that is, his/her overall argument. Consider questions such as: what are the key concepts in the article?; what are the major assumptions and propositions made in the article?; what sort of evidence does the author use to back up his/her claims? In order to identify the truly important claims in the article, you might want to focus on those claims that seem controversial or, at least, quite different from the claims and assumptions of other authors. Remember, major claims should tie directly into the articles thesis.
Conclusions ( page)
Here you will summarize the major conclusions of the article and restate the articles thesis. In a sense, this section of the summary should flow logically from the Major claims and evidence section. That is, if you have correctly identified the major claims of the author, the authors major conclusions should seem to follow quite naturally or obviously. Keep in mind that, although the article may include a number of concluding comments, it is only necessary for you to discuss the major ones those that seem most central to the article, given its background and context (as discussed in the Background).
Problem (1 page)
In this final section of the exercise, I want you to identify one problem with the article, that is, some aspect of the research that you find questionable in some way. Consider questions such as: does the article address a truly important question?; is the background of the article properly identified?; do the articles major claims make sense, and are they well supported with evidence and argument?; do the articles conclusions follow logically from its major claims and arguments?
Assignment FAQs
1) Are outside sources allowed?
discourage you from using them. I would much prefer students devote their time to making sense of the one article theyre reviewing than to spend time and effort on outside research. Students sometimes wonder about using outside sources in regards to the Background section. Here, you can simply rely on the clues in the paper what the author says about the importance of the paper, the related literature, and the paper’s broader implications (often contained in the concluding section of the paper), along with yourbroad sense of important political issues. (See also [3] below.)
2) The article Im reviewing includes statistical analysis and tables that I dont understand. What should I do?
I only expect students to speak generally about the important relationships that are observed and described in a statistical analysis, rather than to speak intelligently on or to cite specifically the details of the math, formulas, or statistical analyses. All the articles eligible for this assignment include textual interpretations of their statistical results that should allow students to understand what the analysis indicates.
3) Im new to political science. How can I answer questions about the background of an article?
Many of my students have puzzled over the Background section of this assignment. I always urge them to ask themselves: why has this paper been written?; why is this an important topic for politics or political science?; and perhaps most importantly, what’s the point? To answer such questions, you can rely on clues in the papers themselves and also refer to general knowledge of politics and history. You might also reflect on what the course textbook has to say on the topic of the article youre reviewing, as this may hint at the wider significance of the research. To see where the topic is discussed, check out the textbooks index.
4.) Do I have to answer all the questions listed under each component of the assignment structure?
Certainly not. The questions are there to help you figure out what should be included under each heading, but its not necessarily going to be the case that you will answer all of the questions explicitly. In fact, some of the questions may not be relevant to the article youre reviewing.
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