1. Find a recent news story that reports some research finding related to the brain/neuroscience. This could for example be an article in a news website/newspaper/magazine, or a video (YouTube, TikTok, etc.) that discusses recent brain news. Ideally the story should be from the past year or two. The news story can relate to any field of neuroscience.
Briefly (in about 5-10 sentences or so) summarize the main idea of the story in your own words. What is the basic finding? Attach a link to the story if possible, or at least describe where you found it.
If you need help/ideas, feel free to contact me. If you haven’t seen any such stories, one way to start is simply to use a search engine with key words such as “brain in the news”, or something similar.
2. Next, try to find the original source of the news story. This is called the primary source, and it’s typically a scientific journal articleLinks to an external site. in which researchers report their findings in a peer-reviewed journal. In some cases it might be a conference presentation or poster that hasn’t been published in a journal yet.
Do some digging to find out where the news story source is getting its information from! The news story should (ideally!) provide a link or information about the original source, or if not, you may need to use cues from the story to search for it. You might be able to find the full article in Google Scholar or in the school online library, or at least find an abstract online even if the article itself is behind paywall (don’t pay!)
Provide information about the original primary source (authors, journal name, article name, etc.), and include a direct link to the article or abstract. If for some reason a direct link is not possible, explain why.
Try to read the original article or at least the abstract as much as you can. Some articles are dense and detailed, but look for the basic finding(s) and report, to the best of your ability, whether the news story seems to have accurately described the original data, or whether the news story seems to have exaggerated, simplified or distorted (or even misunderstood) the original research.
This is an exploratory assignment that’s meant to get us thinking about where research findings come from and how they are reported in the media/social media.
If you find it hard to find the original primary source, that alone could be alarming in terms of the credibility of the news story! In that case, describe the steps you took to try to locate the research findings and see if there’s any corroborating sources you might find that are not the primary source, but also discuss the data reported in the news story