Alexsis
Mercado
ENC
1102
Course
Reflection
Throughout the duration of the ENC
1102 course my goals were met in correspondence to the learning outcome
objectives. I have demonstrated meaningful, dynamic, and inquiry based research
processes, analyzed and synthesized complex texts to incorporate evidence, and
have done substantial revisions and editing of my work. Although these outcomes
are independently listed, each outcome has intertwined with one another. The
foundation established in the beginning of class allowed for my ability to
build off of one outcome and incorporate it into another.
A constant outcome that remained
throughout the course that I have successfully met was outcome 2: students will engage in a meaningful,
dynamic, and inquiry-based research process. At the beginning of the course, we
were asked to come up with a preliminary research question. From previous
English classes such as the ones completed in high school, I thought that I
would come up with my research question today in class and that would be my
final question. To my surprise, after collecting various articles one source
lead to a new question and my research question had changed about four times.
Preliminary question 1: What is the mental health of those behind school shootings?
I soon realized that this research was more than I could tackle in one
semester. I began looking at the articles of the recent Sandy Hook shooting and
noticed a link that tied the shooting into a debate about guns and Stand Your
Ground. I took interest in Stand Your Ground and this is where Preliminary
question 2 rooted from: How does gender and race play a factor in
whether a person is for or against the Stand Your Ground Laws? Although this
question would be very relevant in today’s society, I figured that these two
factors do not correlate and would be difficult to compare. This now leads me
to question 3: How does Socio-economic factors influence how a person perceives
the SYG law? Another interesting question, but after looking into the SES there
are too many factors to take into account for such as income, gender, age,
political affiliation, etc. factors that are well beyond my capability.
Finally, I wanted to explore factors other than race and legality that
influences how a person perceives SYG. I have been looking at the medium the
whole time: media. Question 4: Does media influence how a person perceives the
SYG law? With this question I was able to explore the law and media factors
such as biased networks. Having my question change four times, outcome 2 was
best accomplished. To my surprise I had completed this outcome without
consciously knowing at the time. Each article provided one piece missing that
allowed me to piece it together in the formulation of my final question.
The second most prominent goal met
was outcome 3: students will read, analyze, and synthesize complex texts and
incorporate multiple kinds of evidence in order to generate and support their
writing. My main strength that developed was the ability to write intertextually-
linking gaps of research to form a conversation present in my literature
review. The best example has been found when writing my intertextual map for
class. An example from my intertextual map demonstrates this:
…Devaney
clearly adds and builds off of her sources and there are many ties. Asking a
question starts this conversation: is media bias coming from the content the
media is exporting or is it based off of our own beliefs? This conversation has
been going on for at least fifty years according to Haley Devaney with the
introduction of news broadcasting. Extending beyond broadcasting through the
television, Scott (2005) approximated that there were 32,000 news outlets on
the web by 1996. This changes the dynamic of research since so many news
stations are available other than the mainstream ones. Devaney adds to this
conversation that the increase in media sources allows viewers to tune into a
station that is most fitting to their political views. This selective tuning
ensures that the viewer will find a station that supports his/her morals and
beliefs. So Devaney poses the question, building off of Scott (2005), “why then
all this hype of media bias if consumers are not forced to watch, read or hear
news that go against their political beliefs?” (Devaney 2013) Both of these
sources address the modern day news outlets and based off of Scott (2005),
Devaney builds off of his research. Devaney’s interest in whether personal
beliefs shape which way we want to be persuaded in, is largely connected to our
political ideologies. Genzkow et al. (2006) explains that newspapers can have a
political slant appealing to people’s ideologies in reward for a bigger profit.
Devaney continues this conversation arguing that people tend to read articles
that are indeed close to their political beliefs. Genzkow et al. (2006)
findings have been done 7 years before Devaney’s and Devaney contributes to the
conversation by saying that sure profit is what motivates newspapers, but what
motivates the people are their political beliefs. This is an important gap that
brings this socioeconomic circle to its full.
With the use of the previous example, an important
connection was established. I was able to bridge the gap in my research
question by connecting the research of Devaney, Scott, and Gentzkow et al. Each
researcher had researched their own niche in the topic of media and I used
synthesis and analysis to build one idea off of another and recognize important
connections.
The final
outcome I felt I have successfully completed was outcome 5: students will
develop flexible strategies for revising, editing, and proofreading writing.
The best example that will demonstrate this can be seen in my three revisions
of my annotated bibliography. The first draft of my annotated bib lacked
structure, uniformity, and clarity. It was two pages and followed a
one-paragraph formatting not in alphabetical order. The second draft became
more elaborate, more concise, but lacked context and alphabetical order. An
example of a paragraph was:
Gentzkow
et al. explores the motives behind media slant. Gentzkow et al. researches the demand
and supply of slant in “[their] model [which] is designed to capture three
important features of newspaper markets. First, consumers may prefer newspapers
whose slant is close to their own ideology. Second, firms will have an
incentive to cater to this demand. Finally, owner ideology may also affect
firms’ choices of slant and this may lead slant to differ from the
profit-maximizing level” (48). The experiment was conducted through large-scale
empirical means. Gentzkow et al. measured the frequency with which phrases in
news coverage appeared in The News Library database and the ProQuest Newsstand.
An automated script was used to calculate the number of articles containing key
biased phrases in each newspaper of 2005. Their findings were as follows: slant
is highly related to consumer ideology. Not always does the news have to be
pro-political ideology to that individual, merely criticizing their ideology
will perceive bias.
This paragraph needed help on concision, setting up context,
and grammatical errors. I proceeded to revise the paragraph with my final
annotated bib working on all of these factors. My revision of the paragraph:
Gentzkow
et al. explore the motives behind media slant. The experiment was conducted
through large-scale empirical means. Gentzkow et al. measured the frequency
with which phrases in news coverage appeared in The News Library database and
the ProQuest Newsstand. An automated script was then used to calculate the
number of articles containing key biased phrases in each newspaper of 2005. Their
findings were as follows: slant is highly related to consumer ideology. Not
always does the news have to be pro-political ideology to that individual,
merely criticizing their ideology will perceive bias.
This paragraph now shows the set up of his research in a
concise clear manner while establishing context and following throughout until
the end.
Overall, I
have met many if not all of the outcomes. Consciously unaware, each assignment
put to the test multiple outcomes into one. By learning how to analyze,
synthesize, research, and form inquiries, it became second nature when tackling
any assignment from then on. The most important outcome I have had to work at
that is not listed is formulating context. Context was a lot harder to
establish than I had originally thought. After going to office hours, I had a
better understanding and that is how I made every single revision to my
assignments. After each revision I would look to see if I had established
context. The course has developed my understanding of inquiry-based research.
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