Hello AP Seminar students. My name is Mr. Byrne from Glenbard West High School, and I'm here to talk to you a little bit more about Performance Task 1, the team project and presentation. If you haven't already watched PT1 videos 1 through 5, it's probably a good idea for you to start with those because there's a lot of information that we've shared with you leading up to this step, which is where we're going to talk about how we move from research that you've done.
into the actual individual research report. So what we're going to learn today is about how to organize and analyze our research so that we can really thoroughly understand, explain the problem that our team has decided to research. We then want to present your research in a way that really emphasizes the complexity of that problem or issue.
We want to make sure that we focus on how the perspectives. within your sources are able to talk to one another. And I know that's a strange phrase, so we're going to have a couple of ideas to share with you about how to do that. And then I want to make sure that we just make one quick point about the difference between a report and an argument, specifically the report that you do in this task and the argument that you'll do in the second task later on this year. So just as a quick reminder, there are four big parts to.
on performance task one when we're looking at the task directions. You probably have already worked through your team coordination and that would really be in videos one through four where you would get some more information about how to do that if you wanted to again go back and take a look at those. So today we're going to focus in on that second part, the individual research report, and really what is the connection when we go from the team coordination to the individual research report.
Task directions, lots of words here on the page. I'll leave these up here. You may want to pause just to read through these, but I also understand your teacher probably spends a good amount of time talking you through each of the bullet points that are here. So rather than read through each of these, I want to focus in on the fact that this video is really going to help you with demonstrating the skills that are the three bullet points right here. I should point out that each of these bullet points correspond to a rubric row by which your individual research report will be scored later on in the year.
But we're really focused here about the process by which you're going to go through and demonstrate these skills. So we need you to be able to summarize, explain, and analyze the main ideas and the reasoning of your sources. So you found some sources, but what are we going to do with those sources?
You need to demonstrate that you've evaluated the credibility of those sources. and then you selected the relevant evidence to help inform your group. And then finally, that you can interpret the range of perspectives. And the way that we interpret the range of perspectives is by putting them in conversation with one another. So all these bullet points are important, but the focus of today's video is really these three that are highlighted here.
So let's look at an example. It seems reasonable that as you have found some of your sources, you may be taking notes on those sources. And back in the day when I was doing research in high school, we used note cards, but your teacher may have you using all sorts of different tools, both technological or basic note cards like we did. And for each of your sources, you want to make sure that you have evaluated the credibility of that source.
And then you select relevant evidence, the important evidence that relates to your area of research. And you want to identify what's the perspective that this source is trying to represent. In some cases, you may need to look at all of the evidence in order to determine what the perspective is. In other ways, a different way of looking at the source is it's clear what the perspective is from the beginning.
What's the argument that the source is trying to make? And then you pick the evidence out from there. So that's an inductive versus deductive thing that is really going to depend on what the source is.
But I would suggest that you're probably going to do this individually for each. each of your sources, right? And so you may start with four sources and eventually that grows to something like 12 sources. Now full disclosure here, I need to help you understand that I'm not saying that there's a magic number of sources that you need to have in your individual research report. I could fit 12 boxes on this slide and so that's why there's 12 that are here.
There's 12 different colors in the presentation platform that I was using. So I don't want you to hear that you have to have 12 sources at some point in this whole process. 12 is a probably a good number, plus or minus two, three sources that you're gonna use, but you should really talk to your teacher about what the most appropriate number of sources you have.
The ideal here is that you're gonna have enough research to really understand the complexity of a topic. Now from here, once you have analyzed individual sources, what I have my students do is to put them together in an annotated bibliography. Your teacher may have you do a similar thing, or you may just want to think about what an annotated bibliography of these sources would look like.
Typically, an annotated bibliography is alphabetically sorted by the citation. There's usually some bullet points or sentence fragments of analysis that tell your teacher or inform you really, organize your own research about what each of the sources are saying. And typically the sources are considered separately. Now maybe your teacher has a different format for your annotated bibliography.
Of course you're going to refer back to what your teacher is asking you to do. The important thing for me to help you understand is when you organize your research like this, it's sort of arbitrary in the way that it's organized. It's alphabetically sorted.
which doesn't tell you anything about the connections between the sources. And that's a key part of this task. And that's why this is an important step along the way, just for organizing your thoughts, for organizing your ideas.
But we wouldn't want to stop here for the individual research report. So the next step would be to find those connections between the perspectives. And so what you'll notice is that I have the same sources, but I've eliminated all the colors. Now all of them are equal.
And I've literally, I would lay these all out. either digitally or physically on a big whiteboard or on my screen. And I would look for ways that the sources are informing one another, that they could be talking to one another.
So you could imagine that source one and source five are in contrast to one another, that they are saying the opposite thing. And so it'd be really interesting if you were to put them together in your writing to tell us how they are in contrast with one another. You can also imagine that source 7 and source 10 further a similar argument but in different context. You could talk about how these three sources are different examples of the same thing.
I think I have one more example. Yes, these two may be sort of tangentially related to one another but have a really interesting conversation with one another. In some of our other videos, we have talked about the analogy of a dinner party. And what we're seeing here is that we have the potential to invite all 12 of these sources to a dinner party so that they can all, the authors, imagine the authors coming to a dinner party, and they can all talk to one another.
What we're trying to decide now is how we seat those people at the dinner party. Imagine we have one big long table, and we're going to put source one and source five next to each other because we know that those two sources have something to say to one another. We're going to put sources 3, 8, and 11 next to each other at the dinner table so that they can talk to one another. What we may also realize is even though sources 2, 6, and 12 are really interesting people, they have a lot of interesting things to say about our overall topic.
We just don't have room in our IRR. We don't have room at the dinner table for them to come to this specific party. If we had a bigger table.
we had more time, we had more than that 1200 words that this task limits us to. Maybe we would include them, but we have to make the hard decision that it's more important for us to thoroughly analyze the nine sources that are here rather than just putting listing all 12 of them. Now if you want to hear some more information about this dinner party analogy, UAP daily videos, UAP 3 and 4, are great ones that would connect into this idea a little bit more.
I'm trying to point out is the idea that we're finding connections between our sources. We're not just going to list them in alphabetical or maybe just the chronological order that we found them. And so then a key difference between here was our annotated bibliography that we may have created earlier and the individual research report is that our paragraphs here are going to be structured around similar ideas.
we're going to use our, we're going to group our sources strategically so that we can show them how they talk to one another. We're imagining what that conversation might be like around the dinner table. So here we see an example of source one and source six that are in conversation with one another. We may give a quote from six and a quote from one and then our commentary is a word that we use a lot in AP seminar. Our commentary describes how these two sources or imagines what the conversation would be between them.
We're going to use very specific language that makes the connections very clear, how they, if they are in contrary to one another, if they are similar to one another, etc. And again UAP video 5 in AP Daily is a great example of how you may go about making these connections here. Now I told you I wanted to take just a minute to talk about the difference between the individual research report and the individual written argument, this one being part of performance task one and this being part of performance task two.
Our goal in writing the individual research report is to help the reader to understand the complexity of the problem or issue. I'm even going to focus in on who the reader should be here because yes, this assignment is going to be read at the AP reading in the... summertime, far away by whomever that is. And I will be a part of that. And it's a great experience.
But I want you to be thinking about your reader being your peers, the other people that are part of your team. How can you help your peers understand the complexity of the issue that you have decided to study? We're going to contrast that a little bit with the individual written argument, which is where you want to convince the reader, either your peers or the reader at the AP read.
that your conclusion is the best way to answer whatever your research question is. Remember, that's going to be a little bit more individual, but this is meant to be argumentative, whereas this is meant to be informational. Both of these are going to draw on scholarly credible sources, and both have perspectives from sources that are in conversation with one another.
However, our individual research report, all of these conversations are in service of the complexity, whereas in the individual written argument, Those conversations are in service of helping to answer your question or really further your argument. A key difference here is to think about the individual research report as a way for you to convey what the experts in the field are saying is the most important aspect of your topic. That's why we may have to make the hard decisions to eliminate some of them because it's not the most important information for us to know.
You should think about the IRR like it's a small scale lit review. review something you'll probably do in college and it's certainly something that those of you that go on to AP research will do. So this is a great preview of what you will have a skill you'll need next year.
We contrast that with individual written argument. So we would use what the experts say to support our own argument. We add, we layer in reasons, claims, credible, relevant evidence.
This is all about argument over here. And I know I'm belaboring that point, but I just think it's important for us to remember that our purpose here is informational. So I want to give you practice or I want to give you some examples with a specific topic that we looked at in videos one through four. One of the examples we gave you was the trash crisis in Brazil.
And we talked about how we would narrow our research question from just a topic to a specific. a revised research question that's really like focused and unique to what we're interested in, right? So this should look familiar to you from earlier videos. And then we even took it so far as to identify individual areas of investigation. So these would be each of the four students are going to choose how to narrow in on their research.
So to complete the explanation of the analogy here, what we're looking at is this one student was able to find research in each of these three categories and they organized themselves to make sure that they had the most important pieces of research in each of these categories within their topic, right? And then they're going to make the decision about how these sources are in conversation with one another, right? They're going to say, all right, these two people are going to have a really great interesting conversation at the dinner table. These two are going to have a great conversation at the dinner table, and so on.
Unfortunately, go back, excuse me. Unfortunately, some of the research is not going to make it into the overall IRR because there's only so many words that the student can use in their writing when they submit this work. They're going to use the same strategies. This is just a repeat of that same slide, but I just want to reinforce that our paragraphs are around those ideas, and then the student is going to use... specific phrasing to make sure that it's clear how each of the perspectives talk to one another.
Each of the students within this group are going to go through a similar process, right? So this is meant to be the research that ends up in the IRR for this student. This is the research that goes into the IRR for that student. And what we're going to talk about in video seven is how this group, this happens to be a group of four, but we have groups of three to five, how a group would go from each of their individual IRRs into the team multimedia presentation where they're going to argue for a unique solution. So what do I want you to take away from today?
I want you to review that the purpose of, or the skills that you need to, the steps you need to go through when you're moving from individual research to the individual research report is to make sure that you organize and analyze your research so that you are able to thoroughly explain what the problem or issue is that your team has chosen. You want to present your research in a way that emphasizes the complexity of the issue. And that means that you're going to put your... perspectives of your sources in conversation with one another, you're going to put them in an order in such a way that it really makes the complexity of it very clear.
I hope you now understand a little bit more the difference of the report versus the argument and you have previewed a little bit more about where we're going when we get to performance task two later on in the year. I think the individual research report is a really awesome assignment. I think it can be a really fun informative way for you to let your student, your peers know about some really interesting topics.
So I hope you have fun as you're creating it. And I look forward to seeing you in further videos. Thanks and have a great day.