Educational Biography Project

II. Critical Evaluation Paper Assignment

The Critical Evaluation Paper is due one week before your scheduled In-Class Presentation.

Assignment

Read a book-length biography from your Bibliography. For our purposes, "book-length" means 100+ pages.

Write a 500 word Critical Evaluation of the book.

Note that the Bibliography and Critical Evaluation Paper are assigned as individual work. Only the In-class Presentation may be done as a group project.

Grading

The Critical Evaluation Paper will count as 20% of your semester grade.

See Step-by-Step instructions, below, for details on what I'll be looking for when I grade this assignment.

Background

This is the second part of our major "educational biography" project. The first part is a 7 to 10 item bibliography of information sources for your subject. The third part is an in-class presentation on the life and education of a significant person.  There are separate assignment sheets for each of the three parts.

The objective of the overall project is for us to discover the many forms that education may take. We will accomplish this by surveying the lives of a number of significant people, as researched and presented by all the members of our class.

The objective of the critical evaluation assignment is to provide the core of your research concerning the life and accomplishments of a person of your choice. [Click here to see Some Suggested Significant People.] Remember that your overall task is to become the class authority on your chosen person.

For this assignment, you will read a book-length biography carefully and critically. This kind of close reading of a key information source establishes a reference against which you can then gauge all your other sources. You will need more than one source to form a reliable picture of your person's life and accomplishments. The Critical Evaluation Paper is not intended to represent the entirety of your research.

Preparing the critical evaluation paper will involve employing and/or developing a number of skills that are commonly identified as essential to a general education. These skills include Information Literacy (locating, evaluating, and using information), Critical Thinking, and Effective Communication through Writing.

Step-by-Step

Your work on this assignment consists of four steps:

  1. Carefully read a book-length biography from your list of sources, paying special attention to (and taking notes on) two kinds of things.
    First, look for the raw facts about the person that you'll need for your presentation: you want to learn what kind of education this person had, how he or she obtained it, and how it influenced or shaped his or her life. The book-length biography is likely to be your main source for this information. Note: You'll be assembling a chronology of the person's life for your presentation. While you will gather a lot of key information from your book-length biography, the Critical Evaluation Paper is not this chronology!
    Second, pay attention to how the author presents this information to you, the reader. Use the Guide to Evaluating Information Sources, provided separately on this website, to determine the nature and quality of the book as a research source. Your answers to the questions presented in the Guide to Evaluating Information Sources will structure your Critical Evaluation Paper.

  2. Look over your notes and decide what things are most important to comment on in your paper. Your audience wants to know about this book, but hasn't had the chance to read it. How much does the book tell us about the person's education? Is there any aspect of this person's life about which you would like to know more?
        Pay special attention to the author's approach to telling the "story" of this person's life. Is there anything unusual, surprising, or even suspicious about the author's presentation? Is the book engaging? Would you recommend this book to others who wanted to know about your subject?

  3. Write these things up in an elegant, structured, proofread, double-spaced report. 500 words amounts to about 2 pages using reasonable font size and margins. Be sure to include full information about the book (author, title, publisher, date) at the top of your first page.

  4. Staple it together and turn it in. You know by now that I'm going to forget to bring a stapler to class. Keep a copy for your own reference as you work on the In-Class Presentation, the third part of this project.