Literature Review Narrative

Requirements

Your literature review should include 8-10 data-based articles from professional journals (more is fine; less and you probably won’t be able to draw any meaningful conclusions.)

You will not only abstract those articles and organize them in a table (more below), but also compose a narrative showing how they fit together/major points or themes.

That means you can’t just pick the first 8 articles that pop up in your search; you will need to find articles that address enough common elements to create an outline that could conceivably be used to build a paper.

This assignment is made up of 2 parts:

PART I – article summaries

See the attached Journal Article Summary Form. This form should be completed for each article you wish to include in your review, and will make building the table required in Part II much easier. I will provide you with feedback on these summaries and may instruct you to make changes to adjust the focus of your review or to select alternate articles. I won’t increase the number of articles you are required to include as long as you meet the minimum, but I will require that you use high-quality, data-based journals and articles. If you are uncertain of what this means, see me before you do all of your summaries!

PART II – narrative with supporting table

This part of the assignment is made up of 4 required components:

(1) a methods section;

(2) a table summarizing articles included in the review;

(3) a summary discussion of material included in the table;

(4) a reference section.

More information on each component is included below:

1. For the methods section, be sure to include databases, keywords, and parameters. Your methods should provide a roadmap that narrows down the articles you included; I should be able to find your articles using this section of your paper. This will most likely be the most challenging section of the project; allow plenty of time for it and consider asking a partner to conduct the search you’ve outlined and see if he/she comes to the same conclusion, then do the same for them.

2. Provide a table of studies included in your review. Your table must include the following headings, at minimum. Note that they are the same elements required on your article summaries:

• Author(s), year of publication
• Participants
• Dependent variable (behavior or skill targeted for intervention)
• Study design ○ Independent variable (intervention used to change behavior or skill targeted)
• Results

3. For your discussion section, provide a broad overview of what you learned from reading the articles, summarizing them in a table, and analyzing the trends across categories. It may be easiest for you to break this down into sections or paragraphs that correspond with the headings on your table. For example, your paragraph or section participants might highlight the fact that most of the studies were done with children under the age of 10 and that more information is needed for older populations. 4. Include an APA-formatted reference section at the end of your paper