Compare and Contrast Paper
Place a Bid
Amount you will charge($) A 10% transaction fee will be added to your bid
Submit
Bids Placed by Scholars
No Bids Placed Yet, Consider Upgrading Your Project
Actions
Bookmark Project
Details
Posted By View Student Profile
Subject Science
Deadline (Pacific Time) 04/28/2017 11:59 pm
Budget $10-$30
Choose any topic related to biological anthropology or archaeology that you’d like to know more about. It can be a topic we’ve already covered in class, but you are also free to choose something we’ve covered little or not at all, or something we’re going to cover before the end of the semester but haven’t yet discussed, such as Neandertals. You’ll use the Internet to find two different websites on the same topic you’re interested in. One website should contain information that you think is well-documented, solid, scientific, and well-presented, while the other should contain information that you feel is inadequate, poorly supported or presented, unscientific, and/or even downright fantastic. Your good website doesn’t have to be perfect, and your poor one doesn’t have to be absolutely awful, it can be any two websites that you feel do a better and a poorer job presenting information. Remember that both websites do need to be on the same or closely related topics. If you’re not sure whether the two sites you’ve found are good ones to use, ask me about them. Once you’ve found the websites, write a paper about the websites you found. The paper has no page limit, but you should be able to do a good job in about 3 to 6 double-spaced pages, so about 750-1500 words. It should be written as an academic paper with standard paragraphs, introduction, conclusion, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. If you need help with writing, the writing tutors in the Learning Center, C-217, are available to read over and comment on a draft. Your paper should include the following main elements: 1) Be sure to include a complete URL for each website. Don’t just give me a citation with the titles of the website—I want the actual links. 2) Briefly describe, in your own words, the archaeological information presented in each website. Do not plagiarize by cutting and pasting text from the websites; your paper will be severely downgraded if you do so and could even receive a zero. Be sure to paraphrase what the website says by rewriting it in your own words. Don’t just take entire sentences from the website and change a few of the words, or rearrange parts of a sentence from the website, since that kind of poor paraphrasing still counts as plagiarism and will be downgraded. You do not need to tell me about every detail from the website—summarize the information presented and hit the high points, while still being sure to give me enough information to figure out what each website was talking about. Imagine you’re describing the websites to someone who has not yet seen them (even though I will, of course, look at them!). Tell me the main points each website is making, along with the main kinds of archaeological evidence it presents to support its main points. 3) Compare the information on the websites you’re discussing to similar information from class, citing specific PowerPoint slides, lecture dates or topics, pages in your book, handouts, videos, etc. when you can. When citing just lectures or your books you don’t need to do a formal footnote or endnote, but can just run the citation into the text. Let’s say, for example, that one of your websites talks about macaque monkeys. You could write: “This website covers macaque monkeys, anthropoids which were also mentioned in class (p. 130, PowerPoint 8 Slide 27). The site says that they are “very distant cousins” of humans, which we can see in primate taxonomy (lecture date, PowerPoint 8 slide(s), and pp. 126 and 130, also primate taxonomy handout).” You do not need to do additional research for the paper, but if you do consult other books/websites, be sure to provide complete references for those additional sources, in any academic citation format you prefer. If you cover a topic discussed in your book(s) but not in class lecture, you will need to look at relevant parts of your book(s) to make the comparisons to class. This would include either part of the book that I did not discuss in class lecture or topics that are in the later chapters of the books that we haven’t covered yet. If, for example, you discuss websites on Neandertals, you must look ahead at the sections in chapters 11 and 12 and refer to them specifically in your paper, otherwise you won’t earn all the points you could. If you choose something we haven’t covered in class at all and that isn’t in your book, you should still be able to make comparisons to similar things we did or will cover. If you don’t own a copy of the book, you can use the one that’s on reserve in the West Campus Library. 4) Critically evaluate the information on each website. Critical evaluation of the information on the websites will involve asking various kinds of questions about the website itself, how it presents information, and the kinds of information it presents. Here are some possible questions that might be relevant in your critique of each website. Feel free to ask the questions about these websites that you think are relevant—you DO NOT need to ask all of them! Can you tell whether the website is a reliable source? Does it give the name of a specific author? Can you tell when it was last updated? Does the website present enough supporting evidence? Does the website make unsupported assumptions? Does it agree or disagree with the class? If it disagrees, is that because it’s a reasonable alternate hypothesis based on the evidence, or is it badly misinterpreting or misusing the evidence? Is it making extraordinary claims without extraordinary proof? Can you come up with testable alternate hypotheses that the website doesn’t even consider? Are important questions left unanswered? Is it confusing? Does the website make obvious mistakes? Has what you’ve learned in class made you look at the websites in a different way than you would have before you took the class? Make sure that your evaluation clearly explains why you feel the evidence presented in the one website is good, while the evidence in the other is questionable. It’s usually pretty easy to explain why you think the poor site is bad, but you also need to explain what’s good about the better one! If you want to critique the presentation of the websites themselves, pointing out ways the graphics or the links help or hurt the overall presentation of the information, feel free to do that, but make sure most of your paper critically evaluates website content, not just looks. 5) You also need to clearly compare and contrast the two websites. You should be able to provide several specific comparisons/contrasts between the two websites. One comparison you can make is where both websites cover the same or very similar topics and then discuss what information is presented only (or much more thoroughly) on only one of the websites. Another possible kind of comparison is when one website covers a topic that the other one fails to discuss. Exactly how you organize your paper is up t
you, as long as it includes all of these required parts in some way. You can be creative in how you discuss the websites and the information they present, as long as you summarize the websites, relate the information back to specific material that we’ve covered in this class, critically evaluate them, and compare them. If you’re not sure of your approach or are having problems finding websites, I’m always happy to give advice or direction.
