For this assignment, you are not writing a research paper. You are writing a literature review.
Prompt: This assignment is another building block for the final project. In Module Six, you will submit an initial draft of your introduction and literature review. Your submission should include all of the critical elements noted in the rubric. Keep in mind the differences between research papers and literature reviews. For this assignment, you are not writing a research paper. You are writing a literature review. Research papers take a topic and describe all aspects of that topic. They use current articles and books to support the statements in the paper. A literature review is literally a review of current articles designed to support the topic. For example, if you wanted to investigate color preference among adult men and women, you would first need to review the current studies that are out there on the topic. Your paper would begin with an introduction, an explanation of the topic. You would find peer-reviewed journal articles, like the six in your annotated bibliography. You would summarize each article including what the researcher found, a brief description of the research design, the advantages and disadvantages of the design used, and how it compares to other articles in the literature review. This is essentially your annotations in your annotated bibliography. You will want to add more information to each annotation, but they are a great start. Then, you describe the gaps or pieces that are missing in the research (if any), ethical considerations (if any), and validity issues (if any). Each article becomes its own paragraph or two (or three) and then leads into the next article. Once you have described each of the articles in the literature review individually, you would collectively include a discussion of any gaps in the current body of research. This is where your research comes in. You are going to be investigating an area with a gap. So by discussing the gaps, you lead on to your research question and finally to your hypothesis and the key variable of the study that is being proposed. Now you have a literature review that contains an introduction to the topic, a review of each current article, a discussion of where there are gaps in the current literature, your research question and how that fits into the gaps, and a concluding hypothesis. Your literature review becomes the beginning of your research report. Guidelines for Submission: Your paper must be submitted as a Microsoft Word document with double spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, and one-inch margins. This paper should be a minimum of 4 pages in length (not including cover page and references), must follow APA format, and it should cite at least six peer-reviewed sources
