The instructions for Assignment 5 are as follows:
Identify an article published in the New York Times’ Science section (or in a popular, reputable magazine) that is reporting research findings from a study in the social or behavioral sciences, within the last year. Then find the scholarly journal article to which that article was referring. Read the journal article. Discuss the differences in structure, approach, writing style, and audience that both pieces covered. How do they overlap with one another? How do they differ? When was the study original conducted and published in a journal? Finally, identify the target lay audience for this research and imagine that you have been tasked with relaying this information to that target lay audience. Discuss how the information, presentation, writing style, approach, and format (please do not use a newspaper or magazine as your format of choice) could be altered to appeal to that audience and properly relay the findings of the study at hand. Provide support for your changes using what you have learned in Weeks 6b and 7a.
Clarifications:
You will consider how a research study can be presented in different formats for different audiences. For example, let’s say you locate an article about the harmful effects of screen time for children in the NY Times. The NY Times article discusses an academic research article published in the Journal of Child Development. You would first analyze the differences in format between the NY Times article and the article published in the Journal of Child Development. Both of these articles are discussing the same research, but the formats will differ because one is a newspaper article written for the general population and the other is an academic research article written for the academic community.
You should then consider what lay audience would benefit from learning about the study through another format. For example, you might think that parents should know about the research, and the best way to present it to them is through a formal powerpoint presentation offered through school PTO groups. Or, you might decide that you want to disseminate the research to educators attending a conference through a poster presentation.
Example:
Here is an example of a NY Times article about drugs that President Trump suggested might be helpful in treating Covid-19. The article refers to a scientific research study that found the drug is not effective.
NY Times article
Small Chloroquine Study Halted Over Risk of Fatal Heart Complications, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/health/chloroquine-coronavirus-trump.html?searchResultPosition=3
Scientific study
Chloroquine diphosphate in two different dosages as adjunctive therapy of hospitalized patients with severe respiratory syndrome in the context of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) infection: Preliminary safety results of a randomized, double-blinded, phase IIb clinical trial (CloroCovid-19 Study), https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.07.20056424v2
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