Subject: Sociology
Topic: Topic is anything in regards of type of crime or theory presented in class. In the document below, there are some examples
Paper details:
Gather 10 peer-reviewed journal articles published in the last 10 years and read them. Journal articles should be empirical studies (not reviews) and should present some data or findings of their own
Final Paper Instructions
For your final paper, you will be required to go beyond this class to examine at least TEN peer-reviewed journal articles in the field of criminology and the sociology of crime on a topic of your choice. Your task will be to synthesize these ten articles into a 5-7 page essay discussing the state of the literature on your topic.
Learning Objectives:
- Learn to find and read up-to-date journal articles through the UNLV Library website.
- Add to your knowledge on crimes or theories you are most interested in via the most recent literature.
- Practice making connections between journal articles to tell a narrative about a criminological subject.
- Show mastery of criminological concepts.
Directions:
- Select a criminological topic of interest to write your paper on. You may choose a specific type of crime (Burglary, rape, murder, drug possession, etc), an important area of crime research (crime in schools, gang studies, white collar crime, etc), or a theory presented in the class (rational choice, general strain, social control, etc) as your topic. Submit a short explanation (no more than a paragraph) describing your topic in the form by the indicated due date.
- Gather 10 peer-reviewed journal articles published in the last 10 years and read them. Journal articles should be empirical studies (not reviews) and should present some data or findings of their own.
- Write the essay and submit it in the appropriate location by the indicated deadline.
Essay Requirements:
- Length should be 5-7 pages, double-spaced, 12 pt font, Times New Roman. Essays must be submitted in Word Document format.
- All papers should address the following questions:
- What is the state of the field for the topic you have chosen? What do we know so far and what do we not know? (Such questions should be answered by the literature reviews of the papers)
- What did the studies you selected do and what did they find?
- How are the studies connected to each other? Are their findings in agreement or in support of previous literature or trends we know about?
- How might this information be used to address the topic you selected in policy?
- All papers should have a reference list at the end and use in-text citations for quotations and ideas referenced from their appropriate sources. Students may use more sources if they desire, including readings from the class and other supplemental sources.
- All papers must use at least 10 peer-reviewed journal articles presenting their own empirical data. All peer-reviewed articles must not be more than 10 years old.
- I emailed my professor about a rubric and this was his response.
I do not hand out a rubric for this essay because there is a considerable amount of variation between the papers students submit depending on their topic. Depending on how you approach it, the contents can be very different from your peers and I want to reserve some flexibility in my grading to be fair to all.
I prefer to have some standard subtraction amounts I give to different parts of the assignment. For example, if you have less than 10 peer-reviewed academic sources, you will lose points, usually 5 points per missing source (out of a total of 100). Same goes for if some of the sources selected are too old. Most point loss tends to come from poor choice of sources (using news articles, content that is not peer reviewed, or is off topic).
I give about 10 points per required question for subtracting against:
- What is the state of the field for the topic you have chosen? What do we know so far and what do we not know? (Such questions should be answered by the literature reviews of the papers)
- What did the studies you selected do and what did they find?
- How are the studies connected to each other? Are their findings in agreement or in support of previous literature or trends we know about?
- How might this information be used to address the topic you selected in policy?
That gives me some room to reward excellence, average performance, and poor performance when addressing them.
So, if you write a paper with five appropriate sources and ignore the four required questions you need to address, you would lose a total of 65 points, earning you a 35. Assuming you do a mediocre job with all four questions (5 points per question lost) and meet the standards of the sources, you get an 80, which is a good average score.
The remaining 10 points are usually fudge points. Sometimes I will subtract from here to differentiate a well-written paper vs a poorly written paper with the same content (poor grammar, lack of clarity, etc).
Does that help?
Solution:
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