Studio #2

Part A:
Step 1: Find an article.
Step 2: The Wikipedia article that I chose talks about sexual education in the
United States and the various forms it comes in. It also talks about the
difference between how its taught in high school and middle school.
Step 3: Some of the perspectives that are seen in this article are: Parents
who are for complete sex education, and parents who think that their
children dont need to be exposed to such things, sex education in high
school, and sex education in middle school.
Step 4: Some key terms that could be associated are: Abstinence-only, STD,
virginity pledges, comprehensive sex education, Adolescent Family Life,
sexuality, age of consent, National Survey of Family Growth, contraceptives,
common curriculum.
Step 5: How many teen pregnancies occur because of lack of sexual
knowledge? What do parents consider is too explicit for their children to
know? What is the point of abstinence-only education? Where do young
people receive a majority of their sexual education? Is knowing the human
anatomy a key in sexual education?
Part B:
Some things that I found when I searched some of my key words were:
federal policy makers provide large sums of money to abstinence-only
education, which many believe ignores youths basic human rights and
strays from a balanced sex education. I found out virginity pledges are
commitments made by young people to wait until marriage to have sex and
a study showed that many men struggle with sex related issues and the
definition of a healthy sexual relationship even after theyre married. The
Adolescent Family Life Act is a teen chastity program created by the
federal government and was seen ineffective by some. I was unaware that
there were about 15 different types of contraceptives that allow you to be
sexually active without getting pregnant and can help lower your chance of
getting an STI. The National Survey of Family Growth gathers
information about family life, marriage, divorce, infertility, contraception use,
and overall health and the results of the survey are used by the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services to plan health services and
programs. The age of consent is the age when someone is able to establish
that they are ready to have sex and the most common age is 16; some
people think this is too young and that it should be higher.
Part C:
While doing all the research for this assignment, I learned way more than I
thought I would, and Im not mad about it. I wasnt expecting to get much
out of it but the more in depth I got, the more I started to see and realize
that many of these sites were full of information. Coming up with key terms
really helped me narrow down not only some topics that I wanted to focus

my proposal on, but also my search terms, so I wasnt just entering broad
statements. The information that I got from Wikipedia was different than the
information I got off the websites, because the sites had information tailored
to fit the search term that I had entered. On Wikipedia was just broad and
gave an overview. Some of the information did overlap but not much of it.
Wikipedia was kind of like the table of contents and the key terms are the
chapters where you find all the information. The source that I questioned the
most was the one about the National Survey of Family Growth because the
entire site had like one paragraph on it and it just looked plain but I realized
it was very reliable because it was on the CDC website. The website about
abstinence-only education and the one about Adolescent and Family Life
went very in depth about not only what it is, but the history behind it and the
effects its had on individuals. One piece of information that stood out to me
was the virginity pledges because many kids have to take these in school
while others take them in church. It had been proven that these pledges are
ineffective most of the time, which I had always heard but never seen written
down. Another piece of information that caught my eye was the many
organizations that have been set up to promote abstinence and abstinenceonly sex education. One of the articles even said that virginity is something
that is overvalued or something along those lines, and I thought that was
very interesting. All of the sites that I picked were all very informative and
provided a pretty good amount of research that was relevant to what I was
looking for. This assignment helped open up my eyes to the fact that I really
had a topic that was very vague and it really needed to be narrowed down,
and I need to come up with smaller questions. Some of the articles had
information about my LOI, so I need to go and look deeper into those, but my
main issue is still coming up with questions to ask.