Summary

For each source listed, you will begin with a summary of the information you found in that specific source. The summary section gives your reader an overview of the important information from that source. Remember that you are focusing on a source's method and results, not paraphrasing the article's argument or evidence.

The questions below can help you produce an appropriate, scholarly summary:

What is the topic of the source?

What actions did the author perform within the study and why?

What were the methods of the author?

What was the theoretical basis for the study?

What were the conclusions of the study?

Remember, a summary should be similar to an abstract of a source and written in past tense (e.g. "The authors found that..." or "The studies showed..."), but it should not be the source's abstract. Each summary should be written in your own words.

Critique/Analysis

After each summary, your annotations should include a critique or analysis of each source. In this section, you will want to focus on the strengths of the article or the study (the things that would make your reader want to read this source), but do not be afraid to address any deficiencies or areas that need improvement. The idea of a critique is that you act as a critic-addressing both the good and the bad.

In your critique/analysis, you will want to answer some or all of the following questions (taken from the KAM Guidebook):

Was the research question well framed and significant?

How well did the authors relate the research question to the existing body of knowledge?

Did the article make an original contribution to the existing body of knowledge?

Was the theoretical framework for the study adequate and appropriate?

Has the researcher communicated clearly and fully?

Was the research method appropriate?

Is there a better way to find answers to the research question?

Was the sample size sufficient?

Were there adequate controls for researcher bias?

Is the research replicable?

What were the limitations in this study?

How generalizable are the findings?

Are the conclusions justified by the results?

Did the writer take into account differing social and cultural contexts?

Application

Finally, the last part of each annotation should justify the source's use and address how the source might fit into your own research. Consider a few questions:

How is this source different than others in the same field or on the same topic?

How does this source inform your future research?

Does this article fill a gap in the literature?

How would you be able to apply this method to your area of focus or project?

Is the article universal?

Remember, annotated bibliographies do not use personal pronouns, so be sure to avoid using I, you, me, my, our, we, and us.

Example

The example annotation below includes the citation, a summary in the first paragraph, the critique/analysis in the second paragraph, and the application in the third paragraph.

Gathman, A. C., &Nessan, C. L. (1997). Fowler's stages of faith development in an honors science-and-religion seminar. Zygon, 32(3), 407-414. Retrieved from http://www.zygonjournal.org/

The authors described the construction and rationale of an honors course in science and religion that was pedagogically based on Lawson's learning cycle model. In Lawson's model, the student writes a short paper on a subject before a presentation of the material and then writes a longer paper reevaluating and supporting his or her views. Using content analysis, the authors compared the students' answers in the first and second essays, evaluating them based on Fowler's stages of development. The authors presented examples of student writing with their analysis of the students' faith stages. The results demonstrated development in stages 2 through 5.

The authors made no mention of how to support spiritual development in the course. There was no correlation between grades and level of faith development. Instead, they were interested in the interface between religion and science, teaching material on ways of knowing, creation myths, evolutionary theory, and ethics. They exposed students to Fowler's ideas but did not relate the faith development theory to student work in the classroom. There appears to have been no effort to modify the course content based on the predominant stage of development, and it is probably a credit to their teaching that they were able to conduct the course with such diversity in student faith development. However, since Fowler's work is based largely within a Western Christian setting, some attention to differences in faith among class members would have been a useful addition to the study.

Fowler's work would seem to lend itself to research of this sort, but this model is the only example found in recent literature. This study demonstrates the best use of the model, which is assessment. While the theory claimed high predictive ability, the change process that the authors chronicled is so slow and idiosyncratic that it would be difficult to design and implement research that had as its goal measurement of movement in a faith development continuum.