Prequel Paper For Biology Class

While I have worked on many teams in school and in other contexts, it wasn't until last semester that I had to write as part of a team. My biology class’s work was split evenly between teamwork and individual assignments. For our first group assignment, we were required to find a research paper that contributed significantly to its field, and to then find prequel and sequel papers for the main article. The prequel papers were articles that inspired the main article, and the sequel papers demonstrated how the ideas in the main paper progressed. Then, we were to write an essay tracking the flow of concepts in the papers over time.

If this had been an individual assignment, it might have been time consuming, but it would have been straightforward because the expectations for the project were clear, and no element of the project was abnormally difficult. Instead, the most challenging aspects of the project were the result of our collaboration. Between scheduling meetings outside of classes, learning to be accountable to one another, and figuring out how to best manage the

But in this project, I found the research section to be much harder. We had to sift through a huge number of papers to decide which ones to feature in our final essay, and there was no way every group member could read all of the documents that we considered. The articles were often difficult to read because of the specificity of their professional audiences.Because we divided the readings, whatever hadn't made sense to the first reader continued to be confusing to the rest of the group. These gaps in our knowledge continued to plague us as we wrote the essay; the shared responsibility of understanding the articles often ended up being nobody’s responsibility. I still am not sure how we could have fixed this issue, because there simply wasn’t enough time for everyone to read to the level of understanding required by the