This course is an introduction for international students to research standards and to academic standards in Germany more generally. It consists of a seminar plus a compulsory tutorial.
Students in the MA DevGov program come from diverse academic backgrounds and may need to adapt to new methods of work, course requirements, and teaching styles. The main learning goal is for students to gain relevant knowledge of research practices and familiarity with academic standards at German universities.
The course covers the following aspects: different types of academic text production and how to deal with it; positionality and basics of research processes, techniques of efficient reading and making excerpts; how to handle large amounts of literature; how to use the UDE library; databases (SSCI) and identifying good literature; software to manage citations, how to make good seminar presentations, Standards of citation, and how to avoid plagiarism. Main steps in writing a seminar paper (problem statement, identifying a research question; identifying good literature), structuring an argument; organizing the writing process; formal aspects of writing seminar papers, self-organization |
