The Literature Review

The literature review is your way of joining the professional conversation, by analyzing the conversation that has already been taking place in the professional literature. In the literature review, you report what others are saying related to your work, and identify any theory or framework that guides your project.

Criteria for evaluating your literature review:

It is directly related to the focus of your action thesis, and includes some of the seminal works.
It is not cumbersome; it includes what is directly related to the main ideas you are dealing with, and excludes what is not directly relevant.
Given the focus of your action thesis, it has an appropriate balance between current and historical work and trends.
The action thesis is focused enough that you can read about that question in depth; the literature review reflects that depth of reading.
It reviews the main critical issues that surrounds your topic, including those coming from multiple "camps."
It includes a theoretical perspective that grounds how you approach your thesis.

Your literature review needs to include primary source research, not just reports about research other people have done. It should give a perspective about the field in a way that recognizes multiple perspectives. This means that you should include some of the foundation works in that field. You should be able to distinguish between what is relevant and what isn’t, and leave out what isn’t. You should include both current and historical sources. Your advisor can help you locate the most important sources, and distinguish between what is important to include and what isn't.

Kinds of literature

Literature that argues a rationale for what you are doing. This may consist of background data, opinion pieces, studies that suggest support the kind of work you plan to do, statements by professional organizations, etc. You will use some of this in the Introductory chapter as background for your action thesis, as well as in the Literature Review.
Literature that reports research on your topic (whether framed through positivism, phenomenology, personal narrative, or emancipatory). (i.e., other people who have done similar studies, or studies that are very closely related to your topic.) You should describe this research and its findings. Compare and contrast the research in terms of what authors actually examined in the research, the findings of authors, the viewpoint of authors, etc. You may also locate reviews of research that other scholars have done; these can be helpful guides.
Literature that provides a theory (or theories), framework, or perspective to guide you. (i.e., how someone else has thought about the broad issue, that provides some guidance for what you plan to do specifically.)

Example, using the topic "Preparing Teachers for Culturally Diverse Schools".

Literature that argues a rationale: statistics on who is in the schools; various reform proposals that have called for reform of teacher education; summaries of research on effective teachers in culturally diverse schools, opinion pieces about why this is important or what an author thinks we should be doing
Literature that reports studies on the topic: studies of teacher preparation programs, or parts of teacher preparation programs, that focus on preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools
Literature that provides a theory to guide: This depends on what my action thesis is about. Let's say I'm developing a plan for a teacher education program. To inform that plan, I might use some literature on attitude change, and on service learning.

Once you identify the literature, what do you do with it?

There is no one right way to pull the literature together, but you need to spend some time making sense of it. One thing you should not do is simply summarize one piece of literature after another, with no integration or analysis. Another thing you should not do is pull quotations from literature to support your opinion, without actually reporting the author's main idea. Here are some ways you can go about organizing and analyzing what you find.

Group the literature into major topics that relate to your focus. You may have 2-5 closely related topics that you wish to look at separately.
Group the literature according the kind of literature it is, putting studies together, theory together, opinion pieces together, and so forth.
Group the literature into the stand that is taken on an issue, for example, 6 pieces that are written by authors who agree with one point of view, and 7 pieces by authors who agree on a different point of view.

Within these groups, identify what the authors have to say in common--how are they alike. Also contrast them--how are they different? For example, most of the authors may agree that a particular issue is important. But they disagree on what we should do about the issue. And they use different forms of research. Perhaps one camp looks at the issue from a positivist perspective, and another looks at the same issue from a phenomenological perspective.

Writing Examples

The links in this section take you to examples of how you might write pieces of this review.

An "advance organizer" tells the reader what the organizational scheme is, for what is coming up.
How do you handle defining a concept you will use, when there are multiple definitions in the literature? In the example here, also note the use of a short summary before moving on.
If you plan to compare and put together two related bodies of literature, how can you writing about this in a way that isn't too confusing? The example here shows how to introduce this comparison.
If you have a lot of articles about one topic, and you don't want to spend a lot of time going over each one, you can synthesize them.
Or, if you do want to say a little about each one, here is an example.

Citing research