Teaching Literature Reviews?

 Are you working with students on how to write literature reviews? If your experience is anything like mine, you may find yourself reading draft after draft with literature review chapters that read like disconnected encyclopedia entries.  Comprehensive perhaps, but descriptive.  I'd point this out in my comments, note that the literature needed to be an argument with an assessment of previous literature as evidence, and then I found myself reading critiques of articles, one after the other.  The critiques were insightful in places, to be sure, but these pieces were still not arguments that established why the research question needed to be asked. The students weren't to blame -- my advice was simply not helping.  I began looking for pedagogical material on literature reviews to teach myself how to teach them but did not find much.  There was no place in the curriculum that specifically focused on this; the how-to guides weren't, as far as I could see, going to help my students make the leap from description to argument; and I was not content to simply refer my students on to the study skills service (as good and helpful as they are).  So I started creating material myself, experimenting to find out what worked best in helping my students to write effective literature reviews.  Some of the material involved us in reading literature reviews and reverse engineering them to see how they worked, and some of the material was in the form of exercises and assignments to help students through the whole process of literature reviewing, from taking your first page of notes to working out the steps in the argument.  This blog is my attempt to document this process and to share some of the material I developed.  I hope you find it helpful.  If you have any suggestions for posts, or ideas you want to share, please do leave a comment -- I'd love to hear from you. 



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