Written Assignment (Due Week #7 or Week #9, Student's Choice)
Students will choose one of the two papers from either Week #7 or Week #9, and will write a brief (two page) analysis, due at the beginning of class for that same week. In this assignment, students will be expected to describe the questions that the authors wanted to answer, analyze the experiments that addressed these questions (focusing on the key experiments and controls), and provide a critique of the authors' interpretations of their results.
Oral Presentation (Due Week #12)
Students will prepare an oral presentation about a paper of their choice. Students will be expected to identify a topic of interest from the course, perform a literature search to identify more papers about the topic, and select one of these (subject to approval of the instructors) to be the subject of their presentations. Each student will be expected to present his or her selected paper to the class in approximately 15-20 minutes and address the same questions outlined above for the written assignment.