ABSTRACT

Students have completed the initial step in the analysis of the articles in collection, and have produced a comprehensive spreadsheet with detailed information about each source. They need to extend their analysis somewhat deeper by extracting more specific details from each article. This will help them to organize their material in more useful ways. This process takes in several steps: look for explicit definitions of key terms in the literature; look for key statistics to use near the beginning of students literature review and pay special attention to review articles on their topic. The steps also include: look for methodological strength; look for methodological weaknesses; distinguish between assertion and evidence and identify the major trends or patterns in the results of previous studies. The steps further include: identify gaps in the literature and evaluate students reference list for currency and for coverage.