ENGL 21003

Our group, the Vaccine Checklist group, communicated mostly through texts in a group chat we made and in the discord server provided by Professor Pamela. Even though some of us didn’t have a microphone where we would sometimes talk through in zoom, that did not pose a problem because they would be able to communicate through the chat which we would all be able to see, and if not someone would mention what that person had said. In the beginning, we had some differences in meeting times because some people thought it wasn’t necessary to meet up on a certain day and others wanted to meet to talk about work. In the end, our group was able to get through all of the challenges and hardships and get our work done. 

The peer reviews we had for the literature review weren’t that helpful to me. The vaccine checklist did the peer review with the 65+ group. At the time we had the peer reviews the 65+ group didn’t have much work in and there wasn’t much to peer review. I was able to give them some advice with their title and how they had the building blocks to write the paper and just had to start. As for my group, at the time only I had most of my paper finished but my group was still working on theirs so the 65+ group helped me with some revisions on words I should change and other grammatical problems. In the past, I had already written literature reviews and was familiar with how to write them and also what should go in them so the peer reviews didn’t help in guiding me with what work I should do and how I should revise my work. 

The audience for the Vaccine flyer I knew were adults that didn’t have above a high school education and were for the East Harlem area. While doing the flyer we had to be mindful about the language use and not use words too complicated or advanced. We also had to be mindful of colors for colorblind people and also not too many words where the flyer becomes too wordy. For the literature review, I didn’t know my audience but had an idea that they did have a high school education and most likely a college education too. Since it was a review on covid and there were a lot of sophisticated words used I knew that I could just write and focus on the review of the work. I tried to keep the review professional and serious because it was a serious topic that needs to be of concern and people should start finding solutions and get people with poor mental health some help. 

When meeting with my group we all exchanged phone numbers and made a group chat that we were all accessible from. When we needed to get work done we would text in this group chat to talk about what work we would do, when we would meet, and remind one another to get the work done. We would be respectful with one another and if someone didn’t get work done we would be mindful because they might be having personal issues. Most of us would be available so when anyone had any questions we could text in the chat and then someone would be able to clarify and answer the questions if they could. 

To analyze the primary articles that I found I looked at the outline of the paper first to see what they had and how they organized everything. I looked at the abstract to see if they had a methodology and some sort of research done whether it be a survey or something else. I then looked at that introduction to see if they had any background information and just didn’t dive into the subject. After that, I looked at their methodology and how they planned to get data. I looked for any gaps, mistakes, or even things they did that were good for the survey like mixed sampling, etc. I went to look at how they organized their data whether it be graphs or charts, then how they engaged in the data and discussed it. I finally looked at the conclusion to see if they added any limitations they had and stated their flaws if they had any, and also next steps to help those who need help or make a change in what the paper was about. For me, it was about the mental health of high school students amidst covid, so I would look for any next steps to see if they had anything to help these high school students. 

When talking about high school students’ mental health I wrote it thinking about how I was a high school student about a year ago and what I had to go through during lockdown and Covid. I tried to be sophisticated like a college student but wrote and did it from the point of view of a high school student. When searching for the papers for my literature review, I went to the school database and used Ebsco. On Ebsco, I used keywords like “Covid-19”, “Lockdown”, “High School”, “Students”, and “Mental Health”. I was able to find a lot of papers regarding the mental health of high school students during this covid-19 pandemic but couldn’t get access to the full paper no matter where I searched. I even used google scholar and used the same tactic with the keywords to find papers. I found a few on google scholar but decided not to use them because I liked the ones on Ebsco more. 

While analyzing the literature I had to look at things in a different way because some of the sources were from another state and even rural area that I am not familiar with since I live in the city. Some were even in another country like China. I looked at the authors to try to establish credibility. Most of the authors in each of the papers I chose were doctors or professors. Other than that I couldn’t really establish credibility and just looked at the work that was done to see if there were any flaws or things that could make them uncredible.