Reading academic articles - questions to ask yourself

When you are reading your academic articles, here are some questions you might want to ask yourself.

Make notes as you read your articles - it will help you to remember what you have read and therefore you will be better prepared to discuss it in class.

• What is the title and who are the authors?
• Where and when was it published?
• What is the background to this piece of research?
• What research questions/hypotheses are given?
• What kind of methods (quantitive or qualitative) and instruments (observation, interviews, surveys, etc) did the authors use?
• What kind of sample (probability, non-probability, representative, etc) was used?
• what were the demographics of the sample (size, gender, etc) and how did they find it (purposive, random, snowballing, etc?
• What are the findings, where the hypotheses proven, and how did they interpret their findings?
• What are my thoughts about this article and it's findings?