Question & Explore unit test

Boolean operators

Preliminary vs refined question

Reading an abstract strategically

Following a citation trail

Lateral reading

Authority is contextual

Recording citations as you go

Identifying the scholarly conversation

Currency of a source

Narrowing a topic to a question

The CRAAP or equivalent checklist

Funding and conflict of interest

This course has no free-response prompt tagged to this unit, so one from elsewhere in the course is used. It is still worth writing — the skill transfers.

END-OF-COURSE EXAM, PART B (90 minutes, 24 points). Read the four sources, summarized below, focusing on a theme or issue that connects them and the different perspective each represents. Then write a logically organized, well-reasoned, and well-written argument presenting your own perspective on the theme or issue you identified. You must incorporate at least two of the sources, cited as Source A–D or by author, and link your claims to supporting evidence. The four sources (connected by the theme of MEMORY), summarized in our own words: SOURCE A — Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (posthumously collected, 1950; principal work published 1925). Halbwachs, a French sociologist, argues that memory is not a private possession but a social one. Individuals remember, he contends, by locating events within frameworks supplied by the groups they belong to — family, religious community, social class — and a memory that cannot be attached to any such framework tends to be lost. He argues that groups continually reconstruct their shared past in the light of present concerns, so that what a community remembers is shaped less by what happened than by what the community currently needs to be true. SOURCE B — Elizabeth Loftus, "Creating False Memories," Scientific American, September 1997. Loftus, a research psychologist, summarizes decades of experimental work showing that memories can be altered by information supplied after an event and that entirely false memories can be implanted. She describes studies in which participants who were told by a family member that they had been lost in a shopping mall as a child came, over several interviews, to report the event as their own recollection, adding details never supplied to them. She argues that memory is reconstructive rather than reproductive, and cautions against treating vividness and confidence as evidence of accuracy — a warning she directs particularly at legal proceedings. SOURCE C — Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes the Memorious," short story, 1942. Borges describes a young man who, after a fall, becomes incapable of forgetting. Funes perceives and retains every detail of every moment — the shape of each cloud, each grain of each surface — and can reconstruct an entire day, though doing so takes an entire day. Borges's narrator observes that Funes finds it difficult to think, because thinking requires forgetting differences and generalizing, and Funes's world consists only of particulars, each distinct and none resembling any other. SOURCE D — UNESCO, Memory of the World (established 1992). This international initiative identifies documentary heritage of world significance — manuscripts, archives, oral traditions, audiovisual materials — and supports its preservation and accessibility, on the stated premise that this heritage belongs to all people and that its loss impoverishes humanity permanently. Its inscriptions have included archives of national trauma alongside scientific and literary manuscripts, and the initiative has periodically become the subject of political dispute when member states have objected to the inscription of records documenting their own conduct.