Category Archives: Reading Reflection Assignments

Reading Reflection #10: Statistics and Draft Annotation

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    • Unknowable and biased statistics: Browne and Keeley write “Any statistic requires that some events somewhere have been defined and accurately identified, but these conditions are often not met” First strategy you can use is finding out how the statistics were acquired. Always ask, “how did the author arrive at the estimate?” (135)
    • Confusing averages: There are different ways to arrive at an average and the use of one may not be conducive to what we are trying to average. When faced with an average ask if it matters whether is is the mean, median, or mode. Keep range and distribution in mind. (ARQ 136)
    • Measurement errors: Ways in which things are measured may be wrong, I would ask in which way was this statistic measured, under what conditions and what was used to determine the measurement. (ARQ 136)
    • Concluding one thing, proving another: Some statistics means to determine one thing but the author uses it to determine another. What stats are needed to prove this conclusion or what can I conclude from these stats, if the author says something different then he/she might be trying to deceive us. (ARQ 138)
    • Deceiving by omitting information: Incomplete statistics. What further info do I need so I can judge the impact of these stats. If the author tries to wow us with big number beware. Keep in mind absolute numbers and percentages, if one or the other is missing, ask of its importance. (ARQ 139)

2. In the following paragraph, identify the inadequacies in the evidence:

Campaigns for national office are getting out of hand. Money is playing a central role in more and more elections. The average winner in a senate race now spends over $8 million on their campaign, while typical presidential candidates spend more than $300 million. It is time for some serious changes, because we cannot simply allow politicians to buy their seats through large expenditures on advertisements. 

I’m thinking that 300 million might be a little high, they used the mean instead of the median of mode.

3. In the following paragraph, identify the inadequacies in the evidence:

The home is becoming a more dangerous place to spend time. The number of home-related injuries is on the rise. In 2010, approximately 2300 children aged 14 and under died from accidents in the home. Also, 4.7 million people are bitten by dogs each year. To make matters worse, even television, a relatively safe household appliance, is becoming dangerous. In fact, 42,000 people are injured by televisions and television stands each year. With so many accidents in the home, perhaps people need to start spending more time outdoors.

What kind of accidents took place in the home? Also if that 2300 children was taken from a national stand point then that is a small number compared to the millions of Americans and does not conclude that spending time at home is dangerous. And I would bargain that the people being bitten by dogs each year are outside of the home and aren’t the owners of the dogs themselves. Dogs tend to guard the home. 42,000 is also a small number compared to the millions in America. I see deception by omitting information. Concluding one thing, proving another. Unknowable, biased statistics.

Reading Reflection #9: Evidence Part 2

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  1. The scientific method is a method of doing research that requires you to take certain steps in formulating a theory. The steps include making an observation or asking a question, coming up with a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis with an experiment, and if the hypothesis holds up, you analyze the data and draw a conclusion, then voice your results. If the hypothesis does not hold up you should go back to step one, ask another question. Replication is a key characteristic of the scientific method, the fact that the experiment can be done again with the same results makes this evidence valuable. Whats more is, in conducting the experiments, researchers often use different variables to control the experiments in a way that makes the findings more verifiable and precise. Which brings me to the third characteristic, precision; researchers use more precise language rather than ambiguous language in making their claim, unlike the former evidence we read about.
  1. Surveys can be unreliable for a number of reasons, dishonesty in answering the questions, ambiguous wordings of questions, people not taking there time in the survey and just answering randomly, and many surveys are biased in their questioning. Some things you can look for in finding if a survey is reliable is the length of the survey, how the survey is conducted/the procedures behind it, the context, and how the questions are worded.
  2. The pros of research studies are in my answer to number one about scientific method. But some cons of research study are that results are not proof of a conclusion, they are only support for conclusions, (ARQ p.104). Another con is that some research studies have not been replicated yet and so are of less quality than ones that have been replicated again and again. Some studies can not be replicated and were false in their findings or their findings were, as Browne and Keeley put it; “greatly exaggerated.” (ARQ p.104)
  1. What is the quality of the source of the report? Is the article that contains the study peer reviewed? Another question to ask is how recently was the research conducted and could the findings have changed over time? Look for when the study was published whether at the same time your source was published or before, (you can find the year of a study either in the in-text citation within your souces article or in their work cited page). And one more, Is there any evidence of strong-sense critical thinking? In the sources reasonings, you can find if he/she is using evidence that is bound to his/her beliefs or if the reasonings are more open to all sides of an issue.
  2. A rival cause is an alternative causation to an event. You should start looking for one when the communicator is attempting to assert the cause of something. There are key phrases that should alert you to the possibility of a rival cause; including but not limited to: Leads to, influences, is linked to, and increases the likelihood. Some questions to ask yourself when faced with “causal thinking” (ARQ p.121) are: Can I think of any other way to interpret the evidence? What else might have caused this act or these findings? If I looked at the event from another point of view, what might I see as important causes? If this interpretation is incorrect, what other interpretation might make sense? (ARQ p.122)
  3. correlations are 2 or more events that seem to be connected in some way and can look like a cause to eachother. According to google, (because I couldn’t put into words what a cause is), a cause is a person or thing that gives rise to an action, phenomenon, or condition. The cause is more difficult to demonstrate then the correlation because there are so many combinations of events that can influences another event that the string of events that happen in order for another event to happen is often overlooked in favor of a general cause.
  4. Conclusion: Increased amounts of germs and bacteria on college campuses cause higher rates of illness in college students.
    Reason/cause: College students are less likely to sanitize living areas and common areas on campus, which in turn creates excessive germs on surfaces and in the air leading to more sickness in students
    Rival (other possible) causes: College students could contract the illness elsewhere and spread it even while cleaning living areas on campus. Or, there could be a pandemic and the school hasn’t closed down events in light of it and the rate of students being ill increases.
    Evaluation (How strong is the original argument? What’s missing?): Not very strong. Where does the communicator get this information? How does he/she know that students aren’t cleaning their living areas? How does she know there is an excess of germs on surfaces and in the air? The communicator seems to be pulling causes out of the air when there are many other possibilities of why students are getting sick. His/her evaluation of what is making the students sick is “a cause, not the cause.” (ARQ p.123)

Reading Reflection #8: Evidence Part 1

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According to Keeley, Stuart M. and Neil M. Brown, Asking the Right Questions, evidence is information used by the writer or speaker that helps to validate certain claims, or reasons, he/she has made in an argument. (p. 91)

Personal Experience: Using things from your past experiences as evidence to back an argument. A possible problem with this one is what Keeley and Brown call “hasty generalization,” for example, if this is the case with my experience, then this must be the case for every experience that has these parameters

Case Examples: Vivid stories of events to help support a claim and to get the audience interested in whatever is being argued. While this can be good to use in helping an audience to understand the issue, this isn’t hard evidence.

Testimonials: These are reviews of events. Some can be false, especially if seeing them on the internet.

Appeals to Authority: This kind of evidence is better then the types that precede this type of evidence. You are invoking the words or works of an expert in a certain field. Trouble is the expert might be wrong, or experts contradict themselves withing the same field of expertise.

The article I read, Why Questions (Good or Bad) Matter, by Marcello Fiocco, is an article of how important it is to ask questions. He used three types of evidence in his article. Spoke from experience, “whose job it is to ask questions” (Fiocco), as a professor of philosophy and he spoke of his children saying, “I say this as a father of two small children with a tendency to ask questions for which the answers are clearly not the goal.” Case example, where he spoke of a girl who asked seemingly stupid questions about the origins of math on her tiktok page where everybody made fun of her for doing so. Except when (appealing to authority) the experts came and said that she wasn’t stupid and couldn’t really give her a straight answer to her philosophical questions because they, the experts, didn’t know. I thought that the case evidence was relevant and interesting, made me that much more engaged in the topic and got me thinking of “is there stupid questions? Or should I have more tolerance for people and their questions?” The evidence fit the argument well. Now for the personal experience evidence; I thought this could have been left out and it would have been a better argument for it. His assumption that I care for his experience/opinion or think him an expert on the issue because of it was wrong. Fiocco’s appeal to my emotions with his opinion, “I believe that asking questions should be of the utmost importance to anyone who cares about themselves or others,” was actually kind of insulting and made me angry. If he would have just stuck with the case evidence and the experts, other than himself, the article would have been awesome.

Fiocco, Marcello, Why Questions (Good and Bad) Matter, The conversation, 2 November 2020, https://theconversation.com/why-questions-good-and-bad-matter-147412

Reading Reflection #6: Logical Fallacies

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  1. The fallacy that comes to mind is the fallacy of explaining by naming. It mainly comes up in conversations with friends and family in trying to understand a certain problem, is we state what the problem or person is doing or what they are then we feel we understand the problem when really we don’t. I’ve heard it in political commercials as well.
  2. Back in 2012 I was trying to explain to my mom why I do some of the things I do and blamed her and my dad for things they did in my past, diverting there attention from the issue and onto them using the red herring fallacy.
  3. ad-hominem, explaining by naming, slippery slope, appeal to emotion, either-or
  4. ad-hominem, explaining by naming, red herring, slippery slope
  5. For number four, instead of attacking the people complaining, it could be explained why these parties are good for the campus community. Also, instead of insulting them, state reasons why such complaints are unjustified. Something else that could be changed to make this argument better is the minimizing at the beginning of the paragraph, those actions of fights and rapes are pretty messed up and to recognize that and acknowledge it would be better. Also explain why these types of things won’t happen again, what precautions are being made to stop these sorts of actions at a party.

Reading Reflection #7: Free Write on Individual Topic

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The topic in which I am interested is psychology and how the field treats people who are more ‘in tune’ to spirituality than they are. An example of my topic is some people deal with voices that are condescending and always reminding you of your sins. Some would call the voice Satan, and some would call it paranoid schizophrenia. The bible teaches that the enemy will tempt you to worry, tempt you to doubt God, tempt you to even curse God. So in my mind, It goes to say that the devil can put thoughts in your head, make you feel certain ways, and talk to you in your mind. The secular world of psychology teaches that we are alone in the physical world. There are no demons to sway your mind so everything in your mind must be a product of your own thoughts, for example, your past, people have told you you’re worthless and so you go over it and over it in your mind and it develops a voice, or you have done some bad things in your life and because you know these things to be bad then your shame has manifested within your brain as a person. Two very different doctrines that contradict one another and can be more damaging then if you wouldn’t have stepped within a hospital to begin with.

There is scripture that talks of demons possessing you. So are demons possessing you or do you have a mental illness needing medication and therapy. There is an obvious dilemma here, if what the bible says is real than no amount of medication or therapy is going to stop you from being possessed and hearing voices because the doctor doesn’t even believe in this stuff, so talking to one puts you in a weird position. You tell the doctor your beliefs and he tells you that all your beliefs are wrong, pretty much insulting your faith. But you just tried to kill yourself so you have to talk to a doctor as a safety precaution and the law makes it happen.

I want to research biblical articles on the subject and research into why doctors actively speak against some of the religious beliefs that people have even though the symptoms remain after psychological treatment of the “diagnosis”

In a book of the Bible called Job, the devil goes up to heaven and asks God to test one of Gods faithful servants, saying to God, of course Job won’t sin against you, you have a hedge of protection on him and he has pretty much anything a man could want, take the hedge down and let me tempt him and surely he will curse you. So God gives the devil permission to hurt Job saying, Job loves me, even if you take everything he has, he will not curse me, so the devil kills Jobs family, takes his health, and gets in the minds of his friends to tell Job, “God has abandoned you.” Job does not curse God. But me, I have cursed God, I have seen enough of Satan to wish I was dead (I don’t want this now but I say this to bring in the psychology aspect). That being said I went to the hospital where psychologists tell me I’m delusional and that the voices aren’t real. The voices are a figment of my imagination run wild. I believe this a social injustice.

Some biases I have are against psychologists and how they handle these situations which in my mind are a waste of time. My anger that they’re treatments have not worked might affect my language toward them.

Reading Reflection #5: Ambiguity and Assumptions

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  1. Ambiguity refers to the existence of multiple possible meanings for a word or phrase.
  2. Because you may interpret the word or phrase wrong and base your opinion on it for, or against the argument.
  3. Because they often only offer synonyms or examples of the word or phrase. They don’t convey specific criteria to help understand the argument as a whole.
  4. By asking the critical question, “Do I understand its meaning,” and seeing if you can replace the term with two or more alternate meanings and seeing if its changes your position in the argument or if it changes the outcome of the paper you are reading.
  5. They are a lot like descriptive and prescriptive issues in that descriptive assumptions rely on what the world was, is, or will be and prescriptive assumptions or value assumptions are based on values of how the communicator thinks the world should be.
  6. I believe they are because how can you fight for something without first believing this is how the world should think or this is how the world should be? You can’t argue for something without having the values to back it up. For example, if I were to fight for the rights of animals I would assume that the people that I am talking to wouldn’t think that it is right to hurt an animal for no reason. Having values matters to whatever you are arguing and without them you cannot argue anything.
  7. I don’t believe they do it, or should do it, because positions we take and positions we are against are common knowledge. If we take the time to hear a speaker or to read an article, we are operating under the assumption that what we hear or read will be understood and if it not and we think the material is worth is than we will find out understanding by digging into the article or speech more thoroughly. No need to exert intentions if they are already there to find. Don’t be lazy.
  8. Independence-Obedience

Reading Reflection #4: Group Topic Article

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My group is Health and Health Care. The article I read was State of The Science: Implicit Bias Review by Staats, Cheryl et al. The purpose of this article is to inform providers of the threat of implicit bias and that it is present in all facets of healthcare from Oncologists, to med school students. This article also aim to reduce implicit bias within healthcare. Some main points in the article come mostly from studies done within the workplace of healthcare professionals. The studies, various in methods, found much evidence of implicit bias, and outside of the studies, the message was clear that implicit bias is sickening the relationship between doctor and patient and something has to be done about it. Making staff at a med school take an implicit association test proved to be effective in that the school had the highest diverse enrollment since the school was opened (43). I believe if this happened everywhere, it would definitely reduce implicit bias everywhere. Three quotes that I will share with my group are:

  1.  “First, they predicted
    that physicians with higher implicit racial bias
    would tend to use first-person plural pronouns
    (e.g., we, us, our) more often than first-person
    singular pronouns (e.g., I, me, my) in comparison
    to their professional counterparts with lower
    levels of implicit racial bias.”
  2. “Recognizing that health care settings can often
    be hectic environments featuring stress, fatigue,
    time pressures, and other factors that can
    increase cognitive load, previous research has
    considered the notion that this environment
    may be conducive to biases.”
  3. “authors discussed four possible manifestations of implicit
    bias that can harm outcomes for pediatric
    patients, including racialized health disparities,
    stereotype threat, racial microaggressions, and
    language use.”

Work Cited: Staats, Cheryl et. al., “State of The Science: Implicit Bias Review” 2017 edition, p. 39-47 kirwanintitute.osu.edu

Reading Reflection #3: Issues, Conclusions, and Reasons

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  1. The two types of issues are descriptive issues and prescriptive issues. Descriptive issues are issues that have questions that ask about what something is and a prescriptive issue is an issue that poses a question that challenges something that is happening.
  2. Some questions I can ask myself in finding a conclusion are: What are the writer or speaker trying to prove? What is the communicator’s main point? A question I would ask as well is, “Does the first paragraph leave me questioning?” If it does, I can skip to the end because the conclusion is often there, if not in the introduction. Other ways to find the conclusion is to look for indicator words like, consequently, therefore, thus, shows that, ect., and remember that a conclusion is not a reason, for example, “I had a nasty taste in my mouth,” is evidence to the conclusion that, “This milk is bad.” Also, you can sometimes find a conclusion if you know that your author always has a certain position, so, get to know your authors.
  3. According to “Critical Thinking” (Browne and Keeley), the combination of the reasons and the conclusion results in what we defined in chapter 2 as the “argument.” Some characteristics of an argument is that they have intent, the measurements of quality vary, and it could be a single reason for a conclusion or several reasons for a conclusion. An argument has the issue at hand, the evidence or answers to the issue, and the conclusion.
  4. The main question you ask yourself when looking for reasons to a conclusion is “Why.” “Why do the writer or speaker believe the conclusion?” Some indicator words to a reason are: because, studies show that, as a result of, and so on.
  5. Issue at hand: Intellectual Pride. Conclusion: the anecdote, or cure, for intellectual pride is a concept called intellectual humility. (Not all these terms are found in the source but I summarized it with my own terms) Reasons: Laszlo Bock, of Google, said “without intellectual humility, you are unable to learn.” Intellectual humility is the ability to understand the limits of ones own knowledge so it takes pride out of the question. Psychologist Tennelle Porter agrees with Bock and says that “Intellectually humble people are more likely to learn from people they disagree with.” Carol Dweck says that people that can’t do this have a “fixed mind-set.” The author of “How ‘Intellectual Humility’ Can Make You A Better Person,” Cindy Lamother, also got her reasonings from psychological studies published in journals, experiments that  dealt with correlations, newspapers and other sources.

Reading Reflection #2 ENG 191

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Observation: I chose Cultivating a Culture: Implementing Methods to Embrace Diversity and Inclusion, by Barbara S. Jacobs et al., because I have been a judgemental person in my past and want to educate myself a bit about diversity. I am also going to be a nurse or doctor some day and wanted to see what the healthcare field was doing in regards to embracing everyone for who they are instead of ostracizing whole cultures. The article mentions implicit bias and how they were implementing plans to reduce it.

Relevance: My topic is youth homelessness and what caused it. At the moment. I believe that genetics makes us who we are and tells us what our behavior will be like. If my father did; there is a good chance I will too. So this moves beyond why we become homeless to how we become black, or gay, or someone who gives up, or someone who is smart, and why we are judged for it and how do we fix it, or does it need to be fixed? I believe some of it does, like the homelessness and giving up in my genes; that needs to go. But does the black need to be cleansed from our genes? Hell no, and neither does lesbian, or gay, or transgender. Or does it? Was there a point in time when a baby is woven together that somehow the girl DNA was woven into the mind of a boys body? Is it a defect or is it normal? These are just ideas formulating in my mind but what is it? All I do know is that the people that this happened to don’t deserve to be judged. Corrected, yes, some. But judged and ridiculed and ostrasized? No.

Argument: I would say that the main objective of the article was to make it known, for one, that discrimination against every culture that is different from what we have portrayed as normal for generations is still a problem, and two, what are we doing/going to do about it. The argument in this article resides in a hospital in Annapolis, Maryland named Anne Arundel Medical Center (AAMC), and goes out to all other healthcare professionals who care to listen. They have “cultivated a culture” of professionals and leaders who are inclusive to diversity. Their plan of action includes; performance metrics which is a system that reads the performance of workers and judges them on things like equity and equality, business resource groups who have meetings, discussions, and even role-playing on subjects within implicit bias and the like, they have implemented programming to educate workers on all the different cultures and languages, and finally, they are moving toward acceptance of every culture, including LGBTQ individuals as well as African Americans and Hispanics and the like, onto the workforce within hospitals and other healthcare centers. This is an argument of compassion and love and of what healthcare providers and others want the near future to look like within hospitals and eventually everywhere else.

Reading Reflection #1 for ENG 191

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Observation: In reading “A Hidden Healthcare Crisis: Youth Homelessness,” by Marita Schifalacqua et al., I noticed that I can resonate a lot of what I was reading to myself. There were many times I was homeless as a youth or without a permanent address, and it rolled over into adulthood as I faced homelessness on countless occasions in my late 20’s and early thirties and it contributed to my addictions and sexual deviance. The social injustice in this, I would say, is on the part of parents and their insufficient way of living and there abuse to there kids and on behalf of social services who were not equipped for developmental issues back is 1989 as we are today. I believe I can trace my homelessness as a youth and as an adult to being in multiple fosters homes and seeming to always be in limbo as an infant and into adolescence. Just in 2013, the US government started tracking statewide youth homelessness, as it said in the article, and between that time and 2020 started making connections between youth homelessness vs. adult homelessness and human development/drugs/sex trafficking. Why did it take so long? Youth homelessness has been an issue since way before the 1800’s, they didn’t notice the effects of this back then? Or if they did, why didn’t they do anything substantial about it back then? Because it is still happening hundreds of years later. What can end it permanently? Can it be done? Reading this article though I can tell that we have made great strides, or at least Nevada has. This article was addressed to the rest of the nation and beyond. Why is this only happening in Nevada?

Relevance: As you can see from my observation, if I have a topic, It is quite broad at the moment. I didn’t even have one in mind until I read this article. Youth homelessness and what caused it. This article points out many reasons like abuse at home, criminal activity, parental substance abuse , or rejection, but I want to dig deeper into the mental health aspect on a generational scale. I believe it is a huge problem but we haven’t even grazed it yet.

Argument: Youth homelessness is a healthcare problem. With youth homelessness comes risks of pregnancy, std’s, mental health, suicide, and other illnesses. In many cases, young people haven’t the know how to take care of themselves and don’t want to seek healthcare for fear of judgement or getting reported to authorities. The Global Nursing Exchange in league with the Nevada Partnership for homeless youth (NPHY) and other homeless youth service providers formed a coalition to help cure youth homelessness. They created ways to “break down the barriers that often prevent unaccompanied homeless youth from accessing needed healthcare,” (A Hidden Healthcare Crisis: Youth Homelessness pg. 193), by bringing free healthcare to where homeless youths like to hang out, by parking their mobile healthcare van, which offers a plethora of healthcare services, outside the NPHY drop-in center to administer to youths in need, and by fundraising and gaining new partnerships to help stop the spread of youth homelessness and the horrors that come with it. The authors of this article wanted to give the world the news of how this epidemic could be taken care of. If it was done in Las Vegas, Nevada, it can be done everywhere else. To reiterate, youth homelessness is not just a problem for the various communities that have these young people running around unaccompanied, but it is also a problem for Healthcare professionals everywhere and the cure is a global effort.

Work Cited: A Hidden Healthcare Crisis: Youth Homelessness, by Marita Schifoloqua RN, MSN, NEA-VC, FAAN, Arash Ghafoori, MA, and Melissa Jacobowitz, MPA. These are their references: