You will - or should - read far more research produced by others during the course of your professional career.  In the course of your day-to-day life, you will continually be inundated by research reports over the meda.  Some of this research should be used to help you make informed choices.  Other studies are not even worth paying attention to!  How can you tell? This assignment, and the class discussions to come, will prepare you to be an informed consumer of research across disciplinary lines.

Before you begin
Read Leedy & Ormrod Chapters 1-4.
 

Getting started
Find two research articles pertaining to some aspect of your professional interest.  You may find these in the library, online, or any other source of research studies.

Very important: How can you tell if it's a "research" article?
Beware of "How I Did It Well" articles found in many practitioner's magazines - there's nothing wrong with these anecdotal accounts, but they don't qualify as research.  A true research report will contain most of these elements:

• Background and Problem
• Research question or purpose statement
• Related research (tight synopsis of literature review)
• Methodology (including design, data collection, and analysis)
• Participants
• Data sources
• Results
• Discussion (your interpretation)
• Conclusion
• Implications
• Recommendations for practice
• References

Remember that you need to do two of these.