You are to complete two critiques.  For each one, you are to find a research article (not a review or commentary), published in a peer reviewed journal (yes, that means no trade magazine garbage!!).  You then need to read the article to gain an understanding of the rationale/purpose for the research, what they did (Methods), what they found (results), and comment on their interpretations of the results (discussion).  See attached for an example critique of mine.

Structure your critique as follows:

1. Introduction: Provide a short section on why this study was done, and how it might contribute to our understanding of exercise physiology. (1 or 2 paragraphs)

2. Methods: Explain what the researchers did.  For example; What subjects were used? What did the subjects have to do? What measurements were made, and when?  What statistics were used to analyze the data? (1 or 2 paragraphs)

3. Results: Present the findings.  Try to copy tables and/or figures from the manuscript. I recommend doing this by getting pdf versions of the manuscripts, and doing a "print screen" of a page that has data tables or figures.  You can then paste this into PowerPoint and use the image editor ("Format" in 2007 version) in PowerPoint to crop the image to what you want. I will show you how to do this in class.  Avoid explaining the results in this section, as this is what the next section is for. (1 or 2 paragraphs)

4. Discussion: This is where you need to understand how the scientists interpreted the results.  Try to explain the importance of the findings.  They will compare their results to those of other studies.  I do not expect you to read these other studies.  You may disagree with some aspects of what the researchers did.  This is where you can be critical of what the researchers did, did not do, or how they interpreted their findings. (2 or 3 paragraphs)

5. Applications: Write a summary paragraph of how this research does (or does not) contribute to the field of exercise physiology. (1 paragraph)

If you do this right, you can fit all the writing and tables and figures into two pages (see my example).

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