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EDD 630
Educational Research Seminar: Overcoming Adversity


Literature Review

The literature review is intended to help you organize the research you have been reading and begin writing the introduction section of your final paper for EDD 630. It is simply a brief review of the most important articles you’ve read so far and a similarly brief summary of the overall idea they present to you of that area.

Please cover at least 8 articles in your literature review. The articles should be: peer-reviewed journals; be chapters from scholarly, edited books; excerpts from monographs; or other equally scholarly work. If you have more than one area you’re researching (e.g., ADHD and reading), then you’ll have fewer than 8 articles for each area, e.g., maybe 4 and 4 in my example.

Begin the actual review of each article with one or two paragraphs summarizing describing what the authors did, why they did it, and what they found. This first part can resemble the depth and length of information found in a well-written abstract. After this brief review, describe your thoughts about the given article in an additional two or three paragraphs. Address issues like what sort of overall picture they create for you about the areas, phenomena, etc. and how it contributes to your overall understanding of the area. Also try to critically reflect upon what they did and what concluded from it, noting perhaps any faults in their conclusions and ways these may affect your use of the article in your introduction or in guiding the design of your intervention.

After these paragraphs summarizing the individual either articles, write about 2 – 3 paragraphs summarizing what you have learned from all of the articles. This section is to be a synthesis of the ideas you presented in the paragraphs describing the individual articles. For example, in this section, you can make connections between the articles and compare/contrast articles that present different conclusions or that make different recommendations.

Finally, at the end of the paper, include a reference section that lists the articles you reviewed in this paper. Please conform to APA style both when you cite artcles in the paper and list them in the reference section.

You do not need to include a title page, etc. You may if you wish, but the only formatting requirements pertain to the citations and reference section. Since you’ll need to have these in APA format for the final paper, you might as well get it done now.

The literature review is 25% of your in-class writing grade (which itself is 30% of you final course grade). Like all assignments, I prefer you send this to me electronically, but you can instead put a hard copy in my mailbox in 3S-208 or drop it by my office in 3S-207A.


Grading Rubric for the Literature Review

N.b., criteria within each section are listed in general order of importance, the most important being first.

Element Percent Weight Target/Criteria
Overall Summary 20
  • Presents an insightful and meaningful extrapolation of the salient parts of the articles
  • Contains accurate understandings of the articles and sophisticated critical thinking about their strengths and weaknesses
  • Is requisite length
Article Summaries 40
  • Succinctly reviews the purpose, methods, and results of the given article
  • Demonstrates an intelligent understanding of the limitations of the methods, conclusions, and uses vis-à-vis the overall summary and uses in your intervention
  • Reviews at least 8 peer-reviewed, journal articles or similarly rigorous work
References and Overall Formatting 10
  • All articles are referenced
  • APA formatting is conformed to in all citations and in the reference section
Overall Writing Quality 30
  • Is succinct, clear, and engaging
  • Is grammatically correct and spelled correctly