Food and Aging

Evaluative Annotated Bibliography

The introduction and overview for this assignment were provided in Unit 4 and are repeated here for your convenience. They are followed by step-by-step instructions for completing the assignment and submitting it by the end of this unit.

To see how this assignment fits into your course project as a whole, see the course project description.

In the first assignment, you defined a specific topic and explained your perspective on the topic. This assignment asks you to begin to engage what is already known about your topic, based on earlier research. By critiquing several sources and providing an annotated bibliography that is evaluative in nature, you will be able to examine the kinds of questions that should be considered in the research that you will propose. You will find more details on writing an annotated bibliography in Resources.

This will guide you with your questions and help you to critically analyze information, determining its role in your research. Be sure to incorporate any comments or suggestions that your instructor made on the first assignment to continue the development of your project.

Overview

The purpose of this assignment is to evaluate and critique resources you may find appropriate for your research topic. These resources should help you to answer your question for research related specifically to the topic you will propose in your course project.

These resources can include:

• Scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. These journals have used data and analysis with various interpretations but have garnered a level of trust as they were reviewed, were given feedback, and then submitted by a third party.
• Government, university, and professional organization sites. These Web sites may contain relevant data that will be credible; however, use a critical eye to be sure that sponsorship or links do not provide a one-sided view of information.
• White papers and presentations. These may be valuable for you but must be reviewed as to their purpose and sponsorship.

For example, if you have chosen to research genetics and Alzheimer’s, you may find resources that focus on biological and neurological factors contributing to Alzheimer’s. You may not need to work on community responses to Alzheimer’s or daily care for patients with Alzheimer’s. You will choose resources that best support your specific focus.

However, it is just as important that researchers not limit their ideas on the topic to their experiences alone. Instead, you will need to incorporate new ideas and relationships that might point to a gap in the research. This helps you demystify existing concepts and enhance the connections between new information and previous research. Allow the concepts of diversity, individualism, collectivism, geographic location, and education to impact the research you are using. Perspectives from various positions within society will provide a clearer and more detailed picture of this area of concern. Diversity, mobility, culture, and social norms will also be factors in your research.

Although your topic is narrowed to a specific focus, many variables outside of one’s control will impact an individual’s developmental process and thus should be considered in your research. This will help you to integrate your research with knowledge of theories and stages of aging within the context of your topic. Providing personal perspective within the literature can help you assess the position of your perspective in the professional field. Be sure to relate the critique to your proposed topic: how does it affect your topic? How will it expand the topic and add new information or connections to the factors related to the topic?

Instructions

1. Evaluate, in an annotated bibliography, at least six resources (including the three you found in Unit 4) that could be useful in critiquing for current information that is specifically related to your course project topic. To do this, you must analyze more than six articles to identify those that are most relevant to your topic. Look at attachement for this question
2. Choose resources that are varied: academic journals, peer-reviewed articles, government reports, and other academically based presentations.
4. Remember to consider how the author arrived at his or her conclusions and how that investigation will support yours. Think about the population and how changes in it might provide different conclusions. Cite each article in APA format and provide a summation of the information that is relevant to your work.
5. Reread your draft and make any changes or additions needed after you:
   • Review the scoring guide to make sure that you are addressing the criteria that will be applied to grade your annotated bibliography.
   • Review the additional requirements to ensure that you have met them as well.

Additional Requirements

Scholarly writing includes communication that is academic and uses APA formatting. For this course, a defined set of APA expectations was created for you to use, which you can find in Resources. The annotated bibliography you submit should adhere to all of the following aspects of APA formatting:

• APA title page.
• References listed in APA format.