Assignment 2

Assignment 2

Example Literature Reviews from Lecture:

Literature Review

Before we begin to conduct research about a topic we need to know, at minimum, two things:

  1. What have others written, reported, or discovered about this topic?
  2. What are the gaps in the existing literature that need to be filled by new research?

To answer these questions we need to examine, thoroughly, the research that has been previously published about our topic. That is, we need to do a literature review. There are a variety of strategies for finding, and analyzing literature for the purpose of a research review (e.g. a systematic review, a strategically sampled review, etc.) We will talk about each of these approaches in Week 3 of class.

For your second assignment you will conduct a literature review about your topic using a generalists approach. You will identify 10-15 examples of peer-reviewed literature and then write up a narrative which synthesizes the findings of this literature. The literature review will help clarify your knowledge of the topic you are research, and motivate your own new research project by identifying relevant new questions to ask.

Step 1: Literature Review Draft

The first step in this assignment requires you to identify literature, and synthesize the findings of this literature in a short narrative. If you are working in a group you need to find at least 15 peer-reviewed articles (individually you will need to find 7)

To identify literature you should conduct keyword and topic searches against databases that are available from the UW library (as well as tools like Google Scholar).

You should only read the abstracts of papers to identify whether or not they are relevant to your research project.

When you have identified the set of literature that will be used for your review you should then write a narrative the summarizes this work. For example you might include information about:

The Literature Review draft is due October 30th. If you are working in a group, the draft should be approximately 2 pages single spaced (1100 words not including citations). If you work individually, the draft should be 550-750 words. Please cite all work using APA format.

Tips on writing a strong literature review:

** Note: After you have turned in the literature review draft you should revisit Assignment 1. You will now be able to update and improve your first draft of Assignment 1 (in particular your research questions), and prepare a final submission.

Step 2: Peer Review

We will exchange drafts of the literature review for feedback from peers. The peer review exchange is meant to update you on your colleagues work, and provide an opportunity to learn from one another based on the structure and arguments that are made in the first draft of the literature review assignment. If you like how your colleagues have organized their ideas, or how they structured their review - feel free to borrow from their example (note this is what all good researchers do- They borrow STRUCTURALLY from each other often!)

Canvas does not handle this kind of assignment easily. So, apologies for what may seem like a convoluted process, but here are the steps for completing a peer review:

  1. Post your literature review somewhere on the web. You can put a draft in dropbox, you can create a Google Doc, etc.
  2. Access the Google Sheet for your section and find the row where your names (or your group of names) is listed. (Section A Sheet or Section B Sheet)

NOTE - Make sure you have activated the UW G Suite to ensure access to the Google Sheet. Here is a step-by-step guide.

  1. In the Google Sheet add your project title and a link of your draft to be reviewed.
  2. Find and download or access the draft that you will be reviewing.
  3. Use this template and follow the instructions here to complete a short peer review.
  4. When you are finished, post your review somewhere on the web (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) and provide a link in the same section spreadsheet above. Please complete this by November 11th.

Your peer review will only be graded on completion (whether or not you provided a review), but this is a great chance to read your peer’s work and help them out as they work on their final draft.

A few things to note: This is an individual assignment. If you are working in a group, and you are assigned to review another group - EACH PERSON IN EACH GROUP SHOULD COMPLETE A PEER REVIEW.

Here is an example that may help this process make more sense:

  1. Claire, Nic and Wan-Chen are working in a group. We complete our lit review draft and turn it in to Canvas to be graded.
  2. We then put our lit review in google docs, and log into the class spreadsheet to post a link to our lit review.
  3. We have been assigned to review Joe Tennis’s paper. Claire, Nic and Wan-Chen each write a separate review of Joe’s paper. We each post our reviews in separate google docs, and then we log back into the class spreadsheet to provide Joe links to our separate reviews.
  4. We also see that Anind has reviewed our paper - so we click his link to see his helpful and thoughtful review of our literature review draft.

Step 3: Literature Review Final Draft

To complete this assignment you should update your first draft based on feedback from your instructors and peers. In particular you should aim to better align the problem statement (Assignment 1) and your literature review. This means that, for example, when you are asking a set of research questions, you explain through a review of the literature why these research questions are valuable and worthy of being answered.

A final draft of the literature review is due December 4th, 2020. You may turn in a final draft at any time before this date. The final draft should be approximately 3 pages single spaced (1650 words) for individual papers, and 5 pages single spaced (2500) words for group papers - citations not included. You must cite all literature that you consulted using APA.