Literature Review

This assignment is worth 70 points.
Due on Thursday, October 22th (at 11:59pm). You will submit the paper electronically through Canvas (Paper 2 Assignment).
For this paper, you are asked to do several things.
First formatting is important in APA style. Your paper should:
a. have 1 inch margins,
b. be double spaced,
c. have page numbers in the upper right hand corner, and an APA style heading
d. be typed in Times New Roman 12 point font.
e. Include a title page in APA format (see the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) website for formatting requirements: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ and the Sample APA Paper posted on CANVAS)
f. You DO NOT need to include an Abstract for this assignment.

Second, citing other people’s work is important. You should also include:
a. a reference page in APA format (see APA sample paper posted on CANVAS),
b. and cite your articles in the text according to APA format, (see APA sample paper).

The purpose of this paper is to get you to think about your own research idea and see how other people have examined related topics. To do this we want you to state a narrowed conceptual hypothesis for YOUR research topic, and then locate THREE research articles that are related to your research topic and hypothesis, and write a summary and critique of each article. The articles MUST be empirically based. In other words, the articles must describe a true experimental design with at least one manipulated independent variable. This means that correlational studies, meta-analyses, and secondary summary articles are not acceptable. If you are unsure if your articles meet this requirement you should ask your TA or Dr. Pearson. We will be happy to look at them with you. Please ask during Lab meetings, or at a scheduled appointment. Don’t just e-mail the articles to us.

You should:
1. state YOUR research topic and hypothesis and how these three articles are relevant.
2. state the research topic of each of the three articles
3. review and explain the research hypotheses that guided the three research articles,
4. identify the independent and dependent variables of the research articles,
5. describe the methods used in each of the studies,
6. identify the measurement and experimental operational definitions (i.e., identify how the researchers operationalized the independent and dependent variable) for each of the articles,
7. describe the results and conclusions. If one of your articles has more than one study, you only need to summarize the study that is the most relevant to your hypothesis.
8. give your opinion about the research (e.g., criticisms or questions about the research question, experimental design, ect., or ideas about other interesting research questions not addressed in the article). Importantly, however, here you must also think specifically about how each research article informs your thinking about your hypothesis.
9. give a summary of how the three articles combine to inform your thinking, and describe) what you plan to do for your research proposal (e.g. tell me what your 2 independent variables will be, and what your dependent variable will be).

Hint #1: most research articles contain multiple studies. If this is the case, you should choose one study from the article and use that as the basis for your summary.

Hint #2: most students find that the easiest way to write this paper is to cover items 2 through 8 for one article at a time. Thus you end up with five sections (an introduction, a section for each article, and a conclusion). The last section should address point 9 in a summary format. You may write your paper in any way that you want, as long as the information that you present is accurate, understandable, and matches APA formatting guidelines. Your TA and I will be happy to answer any of your questions about this assignment.

The Grading…

Your statement of your narrowed research hypothesis and your explanation for why you chose the articles you did will be worth 5 points.

For each article, you should also write:

a paragraph or two addressing bullets (2) (3) and (4) worth 15 points (5 for each article)
This can be accomplished by making sure that your few paragraphs answer each of the following questions for each article.
• What is the hypothesis or hypotheses?
• Why is the hypothesis or hypotheses important or interesting?
• What is (are) the independent variable(s)?
• What is (are) the dependent variable(s)?

a paragraph or two addressing bullets (5), (6) and (7) worth 15 points (5 for each article)
• This can be accomplished by making sure that your few paragraphs answer each of the following questions for each of the articles. What did experimental participants do when they arrived at the laboratory?
• What part of the procedure (that you just described in the previous question) involved the operationalization of the independent and dependent variables? Stated differently, what did the experimenter manipulate to create an experimental group and a control group? What was the measured variable or outcome variable (i.e., the variable that the experimenters seemed to be particularly interested in)?
• What did the authors find? Or what did the dependent variable look like across the levels of the independent variable? And was this consistent with the predictions?
These are tough questions. Most frequently, researchers do not refer to experimental and control groups and often researchers neglect to point out the exact operationalization of their variables. So in order to answer these questions you are going to have to think about what the method section describes given the argument in the introduction. Additionally, we have not yet discussed the statistical analyses described in the results section. However, you should be able to make sense of the results section if you keep the hypotheses and the methods in mind.
a paragraph or two addressing bullet (8) worth 15 points (5 for each article)
Some questions you may want to think about as you give your impressions about the research: (a) Do you think the independent and/or dependent variables could have been operationalized in a better way, (b) if the independent and dependent variables were operationalized differently do you think you would get the same results, (c) would different groups of experimental participants have responded similarly, (d) are there any possible confounds in the research that might have produced the results (rather than the dependent variable), (e) did the hypothesis seem logical, (f) might other hypotheses seem like more viable explanations for what is going on, (g) do you think you would find similar results in different contexts (i.e., are the results generalizable). In addition, you must also discuss how each research article informs your thinking about your own research question. Possible topics of consideration include, but are not limited to, how this research presents possible ways to manipulate or measure conceptual variables; how this research makes you rethink your hypothesis (e.g., in the case that the findings are contradictory); how this research helps you further narrow your hypothesis. The important point is that you critique and think about the work in the context of your research questions.

a section addressing bullet (9) worth 20 points
This should be a summary section that outlines how the three articles have helped you form your ideas. You must tell me what you think your 2 independent variables and your dependent variable will be for your final proposal (these can change, but you need to make an attempt).

Important! You can lose up to 10 points for incorrect formatting of your paper. This includes the formatting of your title page, text margins, in-text citations, reference page, spelling errors, punctuation errors, etc. My advice is that you proofread your papers several times, and that you double check the style requirements that are covered on the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) website for formatting requirements: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/.