The third part of your term paper assignment is a rough draft. At this stage you should be able to clearly articulate the position that you will defend (or develop) and be able to consider objections and responses to that position, even if not yet complete. Your bibliography will become Works Cited and will now include only what you refer to in the paper. The topic being Animal minds (Descartes versus???)
What you will need to do is:
First, focus on reason, not consciousness. No one today thinks that animals lack consciousness and no one has accepted Cartesian substance dualism for a few hundred years. You need to focus on reason, not on consciousness.
Second, find some fairly contemporary philosophical literature arguing that animas do not reason. You mention Dawkins saying that we need to look at Science but those who think animals cannot reason are not ignoring the science, rather they are tying reason to thinks like concept use and concept use to language. Science alone won’t answer them. What is needed are arguments about the nature of reason.
Check out the SEP article on animal cognition. (here is the link https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognition-animal/). It will give you a sense of the debate because you want to frame your paper in terms of that debate. I would suggest beginning with a very brief (paragraph–no more) on D and the post Cartesian legacy and then get into the contemporary debate.
Third, you can bring in the ethnology and animal cognition material from Science as support for an account of reasoning under which animals reason. You can also look to historical figures like Hume who think that animals engage in causal reasoning, The main task you have in this paper is to challenge the idea that reason is a narrow phenomenon connected to language use. Using De Waal on animal intelligence is fine as a key source, but he is not a philosopher and you will need to have an understanding of the opposing philosophical position (which you might not get from him).