In this assignment, you will critically read and summarize the information in the peer-reviewed articles and/or books from Assignment 1 and the additional references that you have collected. This should not just be a summary of what each paper did and what results they found. Given that you will be reading more papers than the required 6-8 sources for the paper, you will want to think critically about which of the papers that you read best inform your research question. Once you have decided on a set of references to use in this section, you will want to think about how the research fits together to create a cohesive synthesis of the literature as it pertains to your research question. Thus, you will need to think about what are the major themes in the literature and group your discussion of the literature around those themes.
Include an overall summary of the literature
What types of articles are they (empirical/theoretical/policy brief) and what research questions and outcomes do they examine?
Integrate the information from your sources into specific themes to synthesize the literature into a cohesive narrative
We will talk more about themes in the lecture, but literature could be grouped by the specific outcomes examined (if looking at multiple outcomes) or by types of effects found (if you find contradictory positive and negative findings)
DO NOT just summarize each source individually. Writing in this way does not show that you have thought critically about each of the articles.
