Reflection on Research

I think the strong points in my paper were in the variety of the sources I used and the different perspectives that they revealed. Using different perspectives and explaining their arguments allowed me to come to my own conclusions and develop my own stance on whether or to what extent evolution should be taught in schools. Originally I wanted to argue that solely evolution should be taught in schools without mention of creationism, in order to prevent students from confusing creationism or intelligent design as being a “scientific” alternative to evolution. However, as my research progressed I changed my argument to advocate the teaching of both evolution and creationism in order for students to be exposed to both sides of the argument. By changing my argument with additional research, I hope I wrote a paper that is more representative of a perspective I believe. For weaknesses, I probably could have had a paper that was more organized and had better transitions. It may have also been better to add more quotes in the paper.

 I don’t think I relied too heavily on other sources. The way I use sources is to find certain points that an author makes and then analyze and explain that particular point. In that way, I hope to integrate the source so that the point is stated but ultimately I relate it to my own argument. However, I think that sometimes I spend too much time analyzing one quote that it does not give my argument a good basis to rely on one quote to represent a whole argument. By analyzing a particular quote, I may have had the tendency to take it out of context and simply change the meaning of the quote to support my own argument. So altogether, I’m fairly confident in my analysis and hope that the use of quotes didn’t turn into a summary of different quotes to make a paper. I feel that if there were any paragraph that turned into more of a summary it would be the one about the historical opposition to evolution.