This literature review assignment builds upon AWP 1 and should facilitate your abilities to research a topic through HOD-relevant databases, analyze theory and research found in scholarly journals, and synthesize knowledge of human development. Ideally, the literature you review in this assignment will offer material you can incorporate into your Analytical Writing Presentation.
For this assignment you will need to develop a question derived from the course. Using the question as your guide, you will locate, choose, read, and summarize five scholarly journal articles related to the question. Each article summary should be no more than one page. The goal for this assignment is for you to enhance your knowledge in an area about which you are curious.
You must draw your guiding question from somewhere in the HOD 1250 course. You may return to the questions/curiosities you discussed in AWP 1. You might turn to a question you raised in a reading response. Perhaps a lecture or lab topic has your interest. Finally, you could look ahead to future readings and develop a question from one of those. Whatever question you choose and develop, briefly explain how you came to have your question and how the question is embedded in HOD 1250.
Steps to complete your literature review:
Develop a clear, focused question;
Utilize the Research Guide for Human & Organizational Development to identify scholarly literature that may aid your understanding of your research question. We strongly recommend you use the PsycInfo database for your search. You may use Social Services Abstracts as a complement to PsycInfo;
Read the titles and abstracts and skim the articles to see if they seem applicable to your research question;
Refine your search terms as needed and repeat the search in Step 2 until you have five articles relevant to your question to HOD;
Read and summarize the articles using the outline provided below; and
Working across your summaries, synthesize lessons that relate back to your question.
Literature Review outline:
Title Page: provide descriptive title, include Honor Code, use APA style
Introduction: Briefly, use this section to create the context for your reader. This should include your research question, how you came to have this question, and how the question stems from the course. Note, you should cite and reference the course reading(s) which relate to your question. Briefly explain how you conducted your search of the PsycInfo database—what search terms you used, how you revised these terms, if at all, and how you selected your five articles.
Body: In this section, summarize each article on its own. We recommend you use your question to focus each summary. What in the article responds to your question or helps you enhance or develop your question? At the same time, each summary should include key elements of the article, such as the question or hypothesis or argument driving the article, concepts/theory used by the authors, and conclusions of the authors. You may include any additional material you decide is important. At the end of each summary, include a couple of sentences that state your main take-aways from the article. Each summary should be no more than one page.
Conclusion: In this section you should work across the article summaries and offer the lessons you take from the articles as a group. In particular, synthesize and highlight lessons that respond to your research question. (It is ok for the articles NOT to offer a direct answer to your question. Rather, you might think of how the articles inform your thinking on the topic and, thus, inform your question or curiosity.)
References page: Provide a reference list using APA style, 7th edition.
Notes and tips:
The length of each article summary may vary, depending on the length of the article and how much detail you put in your summary. Keeping in mind up to one page for each summary, the literature review will probably run about 5-7 double-spaced pages, excluding title page and references. Please do not go over 8 double-spaced pages, not including title page and references.
Follow APA formatting rules for title page, page numbers, citations, references, Level 1 & 2 headings.
If you wish, you may write with a mix of first and third person in this assignment, following APA Style guidance.
You may ask peers to read and comment on your work. Also consider using the Writing Studio.
Articles which review the work of others, such as commentaries or meta-analyses, may be used in this assignment. Please do not use book reviews, however.
Do not provide the titles of articles in the body of your paper. Use the APA author and date in-text citation system. Your references will list the article titles.
