The first step that must be taken in any effective research project is to define the problem: what do you want to know? In our case, we have decided to chase a question together to see if we can come up with a useful answer. Our research question looks something like this:

To what extent does teacher education belong in a liberal arts context, and what would a model program in teacher education in such a context look like?

To answer that question we have already begun reviewing some literature and gathering information about the state of teacher education here and elsewhere. As you continue to gather information and chase additional questions that may come up, you will want to work toward bringing your research together in a comprehensive literature review essay. The purpose of the literature review is twofold. On the one hand, a well-constructed literature review establishes your credibility to make judgments about the question(s) you are pursuing answers to. We all have ideas, some of them good ones—but our ideas simply don’t carry the same weight in the research community if they aren’t grounded in existing literature. We need to know what others know before we can explain what we know and add to that literature base.

The second purpose of a literature review is to lay the groundwork for those claims you will eventually make. The link between the literature base you explored and the eventual recommendations you make should be clear and compelling. This doesn’t have to mean that your conclusions are simply an extension of the conclusions drawn by others; often, what researchers look to do is expose a gap or “hole” in the literature that can be filled with new knowledge. In our case what we’re going to try to do is learn as much as we can about our existing program in teacher education here at Gettysburg College, even as we look outward to se what we can glean from programs that exist in other places. You have wide latitude here to do that work as you see fit. My best advice at this stage is to pursue questions and ideas that you think are interesting, gather as much information as you can, and let the conclusions come forth from that.

General guidelines

So you know the broad outline of what you need to do here: read, read, read, and gather insights. To help you organize your thinking I have a few pieces of advice.

1. Keep a running list of everything you read. Even if it’s just a short article you found online or a piece of a website (like a program description from some other college or university), write it down. You never know what will be useful to you later, and you also want to be able to keep track of all the work you’ve done.
2. Write down your thoughts on everything you read. No matter how big or small, write at least a couple of sentence or a paragraph or two about everything you read. What did the author have to say? Was this particular reading useful or not? You’ll find these annotations extremely helpful when it’s time to write your review essay later on.
3. Organize your list. One obvious way to organize is by type—put book chapters, journal articles, websites, opinion pieces, etc., in different categories. Or you may want to use a more sophisticated system: maybe “useful” vs “less useful,” or “essential,” “foundational,” and “peripheral.” Whatever system works for you to keep your work organized.
4. Take stock on a regular basis. A final piece of advice is to stop yourself every now and then to consider your growing literature base as a whole. You should write down insights related to everything you read, but you should also stop occasionally to consider how all the pieces fit together. You might consider doing this on a weekly basis, if you’re talking a regimented approach, or you may want to establish checkpoints after completing significant reading assignments. Or just let your internal clock let you know: you should get a feeling when it’s time to start synthesizing ideas again.
5. Know when you’ve had enough. Maybe the hardest thing about constructing a literature review is recognizing that you can never know everything. At some point you have to stop gathering information and turn to interpreting it. Set a schedule for yourself and try to stick to it, or decide on a general number of resources you would like to consult and the use that as a ballpark figure to let yourself know when it’s tie to move on. You may also find yourself reaching a point where the insights you glean from new resources are not especially helpful; that’s a good sign that you’re ready to move to the analysis stage.

Writing the Review Essay

As you prepare to conclude your information gathering, you need to turn your attention to writing the review essay. How do you know when you’re ready? In this case, you have deadline—that should help a lot. Be sure to leave yourself plenty of time to begin writing and revising so your essay says what you want it to say. (If you don’t have a formal deadline, it’s a good idea to set a self-imposed deadline to keep yourself moving forward; either way, remember that there is only so much you can learn out of the endless supply of information out there in the world. Ideally the literature you review for one project will continue building even after that project comes to a conclusion—but even if it doesn’t, you have to know when to say when.)

An effective literature review essay will be reasonably tight, will focus on analysis of the literature base, and will provide a clear sense of the significance of the material you reviewed. Again, the key focus here is on how the literature provides a base for the other work you do on the project. It establishes your credibility and point in the direction of the new knowledge you hope to share.

How long should it be? And how many sources should I cite?

These are both difficult questions to answer—the answers depend on the nature of your project. A good rule of thumb might be to say that the literature review should comprise about 30% of the final manuscript—so, in other words, if you are planning to write a 30-40 page thesis, the literature review should be about 9-12 pages long; in a journal article that runs about 10,000 words, your lit review might comprise 3,000 of them. This is tricky though: there is no hard and fast rule, and different kinds of projects call for different literature review lengths. For the sake of clarity, since this is a learning exercise, we’ll cap the literature assignment in this course at 10-12 pages, with approximately 10-12 total sources cited.

Beyond that, your review essay should, in fact, be a review essay: your job is not merely to summarize or recount what you read, but to provide a perspective on why it matters. Yo can find great examples of literature reviews in some of the things you have read so far, or I can provide others for you. The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University also has some useful tips for writers of literature reviews. You can read those here.

When is my essay due?

We have set a due date of October 18 for your literature review essay.