Research Tracker & Bibliographic Report

General Information: Project Objective: Create an annotated bibliographic report to meet an assignment after first creating and using a research tracker. These are two separate deliverables required for this activity. Why Are We Doing This?: In addition to assessing your performance in this course, this assignment will be used to assess the accounting program’s achievement of program outcomes for the Information Literacy (INFO) Core Learning Area (CLA), as described in the university’s Program Assessment Plan. The INFO CLA is defined as follows: demonstrate an ability to use libraries and other information resources to effectively locate, select, and evaluate needed information. The accounting program outcomes are defined as the ability to research accounting information to solve business problems and improve decision making. Learning Objective: Demonstrate the ability to use academic and professional databases to research and support recommendations on emerging accounting issues. Requirements: Overview: We learn about a variety of topic in ACCT 424 Advanced Accounting, including the very important topic of accounting for business mergers and acquisitions (M&As). In addition to the “debit and credits” of M&As there is a host of activities an accountant would be involved in if they get involved in M&As in practice. One such activity is that of Due Diligence. By performing this activity, you will not only accomplish required learning objectives, you will also develop an understanding of what Due Diligence is, a very important topic to have some knowledge about in practice. The Scenario: Place yourself in the role of a new team member at an organization that’s just begun the process of negotiating being acquired by another company. Your team lead as come to you and your co-workers and told you that in a month’s time the other company will be starting the process of Due Diligence, and your team is going to need to support that effort. Well, your company has never been bought out before, so this whole process is new to everyone, including this Due Diligence thing. Since your team lead knows you successfully completed Advanced Accounting at UMUC, she knows you’re the best of the best and as such she assigns you the task of researching Due Diligence, and wants you to report back to the team with two specific deliverables: a Research Tracker and an Annotated Bibliography. Part I – The Research Tracker A Research Tracker is a straight forward activity that can be thought of as something that simply “tells the story” of your thought process and logic used in finding information on a subject. In our case, that subject is going to be Due Diligence. Your requirement for the Research Tracker deliverable will be to research the subject of Due Diligence and create a basic Research Tracker to report on your results. The submitted deliverable should take the form of a chart created in Word or Excel that “tells the story” of your research efforts. An example of a Research Tracker for the subject of “Violence in Television” is shown below. Your submission for our purposes of researching Due Diligence should use the same format and column heading as this example, and be completed using the same logic. For our class, about 10 rows / topics should suffice. This is the first part of this activity for our class, and your submission consisting of a Word document or Excel file is to be made as part of your week #7 submission. This part of this activity is worth 3% of your final grade, and will be evaluated based on the grading matrix presented at the end of this document. Sample Research Tracker for the Subject of Violence in Television: Question Pursuing, Information Sought, Rationale for Search Tool or Source Used Concepts or Keywords, Terms, Phrases Results Decision, Action, Next Step Background information General encyclopedias (library reference section) television, violence Found mostly general information on “television.” Found one small article in Encyclopedia Americana on “Violence in Television.” Need more background info? Will check other reference books. More background information Looked in Encyclopedia of Television (REF PN 1992.18 .E53 1997) violence Found a small article on “Violence in Television” (page 1769 – volume 3). Described correlation between television violence and later behavior Have decided to focus on relationship between television violence and human behavior. Will check for books in online catalog. Description of human behavior Looked in Delhi Online Catalog human behavior Found a lot of good general books on human behavior, including The Winning Edge by Andrew J. DuBrin. Will focus more. Will try “television” and “violence.” Delhi Online Catalog Looked under “television” and “violence.” Found a very good book titled “Violence in the Media” by James D. Torr (CIRC P96.V5 V563 2001). Will take notes from books. Need to narrow focus even more with magazine or journal articles. Used InfoTrac Tried “television and human behavior.” Didn’t find much. Will try other, broader keywords. Used InfoTrac Tried “television and behavior.” Found way too many irrelevant articles! Will try another keyword: “violence.” Used InfoTrac Tried “television violence and behavior.” Found several very good recent articles, including “Aggressive response to TV violence tracks to adulthood.” Sally Koch Kubetin. Pediatric News, May 2003, v37 i5 p23. Will print out and review articles, and take notes. Try to find good Web sites to supplement other information. Used Google Tried “television violence and behavior.” Found several Web sites that looked good. The first one was titled “Violence on television,”www.apa.org/pubinfo/violence.html. This Web site is published by the American Psychological Association. Will examine other Web sites and list findings. Part II – An Annotated Bibliography An Annotated Bibliography is a simple report that gives a summary of key items of interest related to a topic. The purpose of annotations is to provide the reader with a summary and an evaluation of each source. An Annotated Bibliography is not a report on a subject, it is simply a review of literature or websites found relating to a topic. A good review of what an Annotated Bibliography is can be found here: http://sites.umuc.edu/library/libhow/bibliography_tutorial.cfm