Topic History of family engagement High school and Topic Family engagement in Urban areas
Introduction:
Why do we care about this issue/rationale
What do we know about the topic
What do we not know about the topic
Are there gaps in the literature
Objective(s) of your paper
Roadmap: What will you be talking about in your paper? What should the author expect in the sections that follow?
Main body:
Create themes/buckets for your sources each of these can then become a heading in your paper where you then talk about the sources that fell into that theme/bucket
You shared feeling as though you may need some additional sources I might look back at the papers that are really resonating with you/your topic, and see who those authors have cited in their papers, and then look at those articles
Conclusion:
Circle back to the issue/problem you shared about at the beginning of your paper; highlight the main points from the literature you review.
Why does this matter to educators/practitioners? How does it impact/affect them?
What additional research needs to be done on this topic?
How should the paper be organized?
Generally, you should have an introduction, and main body, and a conclusion.
Introduction: Explains the social problem that the research in your literature review tries
to address explains why we should be interested/concerned about that problem, and
gives us a brief preview of what youre going to review in this paper.
Main Body: Where you do the bulk of the literature review.
Conclusion: Where you summarize the main points of the literature, explain what that
literature helps us understand about the social problem, implications for educational
practitioners, and what research work is still needed.
The specifics of how your paper should be organized will be based on your topic.
One major tip do not just list the papers one by one, as this is not an annotated bibliography.
Instead, consider the following:
(1) Read all of the literature first, take notes, and reflect on what youve read.
(2) Put together an outline of what youd cover and in what order (you are required to do
this anyway in the earlier assignment). Group similar findings/insights together.
(3) For each section, before you start writing about the papers youve read, write the topic
sentences and takeaways.
(4) Then fill in the gaps with the evidence from the literature.
Any tips on how to write?
There are several things you should keep in mind to write a good paper.
Write your lesson plan. A general tip for organizing your writing each section is to organize it as
you would if you were trying to teach it to someone else. How would you explain things, in what
order, and how would you make sure to emphasize what is important and help readers know the
takeaways? If you had to split the lesson that your literature review is covering across 3-5 days,
how would you group the content so it logically flows and so each section is focused enough to
not be confusing?
One topic per paragraph.
Each paragraph should only cover one topic at a time.
Use transitions.
You will likely be covering a variety of topics.
It is important to include
sentences and statements that help the reader transition from thinking about one topic to
thinking about another; do not just switch trains abruptly without telling the reader why.
Always be synthesizing what you have read.
There are several
writing things I would do in order to make sure you are doing this consistently:
1. At the beginning of each paragraph, you should have a sentence or two with the main
point you are about to cover (topic sentences!).
2. At the end of each paragraph, you should have a sentence or two summarizing the main
point, but also telling us why it is important (i.e., what is the big thing this helps us
understand to address the problem?).
3. At the end of each section and subsection, you should have a few sentences summarizing
what you have covered and explaining what we should take away from it (what should we
remember as we continue to read?).
