Thyroid Hormone Psychology

Writing Assignment I

This Assignment involves reading through a section in the textbook, comparing that to information gleaned from a scientific article, and then relating that back to previous chapter material. The Assignment revolves around thyroid hormone physiology. Besides this being a written assignment, it also illustrates an awesome method of study, preparation and learning.

Steps of the Assignment:

1. Read from the text, Section 23.3 – “Thyroid Hormones’, two specific sub-sections under the headings ‘Thyroid Hormones Contain Iodine’ and ‘TSH Controls the Thyroid Gland’. Also look at Figures

23.4 and 23.5 for the information displayed there.

• Also from the text, Chapter 7 – Look intently at Table 7.1, specifically the characteristics listed in the ‘Thyroid Hormones’ column. Pay attention to what each characteristic is (i.e. the characteristic categories as listed on the left side of Table 7.1)
• Read from the following scientific article: Carvalho & Dupuy – Thyroid Article.pdf – Sections 1 through 4 (Introduction; Molecules Involved; Mechanisms of Synthesis; Thyroid Hormone Release).
• Your first goal is to relate the material in those two sub-sections of Chapter 23 (Section 23.3) back to material previously covered in Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6, by identifying topic(s) of those chapters which are exemplified in that Chapter 23 material.
• Your second goal is to identify material in the scientific article which expands on material mentioned in Chapter 23. As an example (which you can certainly use to get things rolling): the first sentence of the second paragraph of the ‘Thyroid Hormones Contain Iodine’ sub-section states that thyroid hormones are amines derived from the amino acid tyrosine. That’s a great piece of information (in fact, that’s why thyroid hormones are classified as amines), But it’s not anywhere near the full story. The article goes on to explain where exactly the tyrosine is ‘derived’ from, to make the thyroid hormones. This would be a place you could ‘expand’ on the material with a sentence something like “Thyroid hormones are derived from tyrosine obtained from the thyroglobulin protein in the thyroid follicle”.

• Envision your finished written product a series of 6 paragraphs, with each paragraph being a series of brief sentences/statements. The first paragraph should contain statements relating the Chapter 23 material back to topics from Chapter 2. The second paragraph should contain statements relating the Chapter 23 material back to topics from Chapter 3. And so on, with the first 5 paragraphs of your written work relating back to topics from Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 and the last paragraph containing statements where you see the article expanding on the material from Chapter 23 (Section 23.3) – similar to the example above.

Some tips and grading information:

1. This probably won’t be something you complete in one sitting. The submission of the Assignment will be into a Text Box in the Assignment Folder. It will probably work best to work on this over time in a document program (such as Word or Google Docs) and then when you are finished and ready to submit it, paste it all into the Text Box. There is no way to save work in the Text Box and come back to it later.
2. The best written work I can envision will take every single instance described in the Chapter 23.3 material that exemplifies previous course content and identify it as such. Grading of your written work will involve looking for your identification of the topics from Chapters 2 through 6 that appear in the Chapter 23 material.
3. Chapters 2 through 6 are not represented equally in the material from Chapter 23, some will be more represented, some less.
4. For the part where you expand on Chapter 23 material with related information from the scientific article, I am envisioning the best

written work to contain 5 such statements. There are many more than 5 opportunities for this expansion. Use the example in Step 5 above as the first, if you wish.

• Each paragraph will contribute equally during scoring, meaning relating back to Chapter 2 topics = 1/6 of your score; relating back to Chapter 3 topics = 1/6 of your score, etc…………….expanding on Chapter 23 with material from the article = 1/6 of your score.