Go over step-by-step how to create a literature review database notice down below here that there
is a summary tab which allows you to summarize an article in one row and then a detailed review
which provides details of the results of each article categorized by theme and sub theme so
let's start with the summary and I'm gonna go over each of the categories here or the columns
we have authors so you can cite one author k comma 2009 two authors K and Kanak comma
2007 or multiple author authors and what I mean by that is more than two authors and you put K at Al
period comma 2009 next you fill in the population and my population I mean the educational level of
the population elementary middle school secondary undergraduate graduate pre-service teachers or you
could be focusing on professionals management or faculty next you want to look at the sample size
so you simply type that in if the sample size isn't there of course you would just leave it
blank sample description you'd want to take a look at the sample description and in your estimation
decide whether it is incomplete whether there's missing information like number of males and
females socioeconomic status there could be all sorts of missing information but you're looking
for information that you think might be relevant to the study but hasn't been included is there a
partial description so perhaps they describe some details they provide gender but not SES or other
key factors that might be important or whether it's a relatively complete sample description
so you give it a 0 a 1 or a 2 then you have to if it's a quantitative study and uses scales to
turn whether the scales are reliable or valid not the quick way to do that without knowing a lot of
statistics is to press ctrl F when you're in the article and look for the word rely up that will
grab reliable reliability and see if it's in there in the methods section let's do the same thing for
valid search for that control F and see if it's in there if it isn't chances are the study hasn't
looked at reliability and validity if you have any doubt though just put a question mark there you're
not sure and of course you can come back to it when you know more and you can assess it in more
detail don't spend a lot of time trying to figure that out now what if it's a qualitative study
you have to give it some sort of an assessment whether it's a limited where there's a limited
number of checks and balances whether some checks or multiple checks and so what do I mean by that
so what you might look at is whether there's a transparency of analysis whether the author's tell
you how they analyze the data when you get a good sense of what they did not a quick description but
a detailed script description and maybe even a coding scheme you might look at the credibility
of the data where that was there more than one person that analyzed the data did the authors
present negative cases as well as positive cases in terms of the results was there triangulation
of the results was more than one data source use observations interviews focus groups was there a
participant check of the data was the data shown to the participant and said this is what I think
you said is it what you said and was there a rich description provided you don't have to have them
all but those are the kinds of things you look for in a qualitative study so based on those you
can you can take a look and say well if was there anything there was there some limited description
of how the data was analyzed was there some description and you could see that the results
were rich and there was some checks and balances or were there multiple checks where you could see
triangulation where the data was transparent where there was someone else checking the data
so you make some sort of estimation of that if it's a qualitative study you want to put in the
subject area that's important may perhaps there are multiple subject areas you want to put in the
type of data collected was a qualitative collect data collected or that was an observational data
survey data performance data there may be another category of missed next you want to take a look
at the results and typically with results we look at behaviors attitudes and learning this
is just a summary it's a quick summary so we look at behaviors and we determine whether were there
negative behaviors determined no difference or mixed positive and negative that would also be
scored zero and or whether just positive results in you score that a one you do the same thing if
you're measuring attitudes or learning alright and then finally you clearly described what the
purpose of the paper was so this study looked at the impact of learning objects on secondary map
students attitudes and learning performance all right so we know what we're looking at attitudes
and learning performance and I might even put in more detail in terms of the attitudes I looked
at I go might have put in brackets ease-of-use engagement that kind of thing to be specific
you don't want to write a treatise here but you want to have a good summary of the paper this
would suffice so that's the summary section of how you would summarize an article you try to
keep it clean use numbers minimal words and use the categories provided now the detailed review
looks at the results and only the results of the paper you're not looking at the literature of
and putting in information here and you could put in the method but typically we just look at
the results what did K and 9 find out about in this case web-based learning tools alright so
let's look at the level of detail of the result that you should provide now you don't have put
have to put color coding in here I just did to emphasize what you need to put in you have to
put in who that's in blue secondary school math students we know that's pretty clear and then the
what well we're looking at attitudes here based on what so what kind of data based on survey data
was an observational data was an interview data was were positive with respect to what ease of
use so it's attitudes and ease of use web-based learning tools so I put these abuse here that
would be the sub theme and the theme is attitude okay second example well we still have secondary
school math students based on survey data this is engagement now so the only thing that's changed is
this sub theme same result there positive and in this case it's learning so it's attitudes
about learning okay so those are attitude attitude attitude and then I'm looking at performance and
here it's secondary and that should say school because want to be specific secondary school
student scores based on performance measures all right increased significantly so we know
this is a statistic test well when we look at the word significantly we're just gonna see a
p-value and we're gonna see something the word significantly different in the actual results
and then I actually put in in this study reported the difference thirty five percent between pre and
post-test scores when web-based learning tools were used that's the level of detail that you
need to put in for each results so that each result stands on its own and we can look at
that later on and understand it if you're too brief when look at this perhaps a month or two
months later it will be difficult to understand the result and then you'll have to go back to the
paper again and reread those sections so you don't want to do that so this is the detailed
review section part of a literature review in summary you fill in the one-line summary of an
article and then you fill in the results based on the article with one result reported per row
so you're obviously gonna have multiple results in a paper if the paper has multiple data to report