Weekly Critical Literature Review Specifications
Section 1. A summary of the paper
This section tries to tell the audience what the paper is about. You may want to
organize your summary into following paragraphs:
1.1. The Reference of the paper in APA format.
1.2. Purposes of the study, the research problem(s) the author(s) tried to
address, and the research questions
1.3. Related literature. What are the key concepts involved or related to the
study? How many articles this paper has reviewed?
1.4. Research design or strategy, including what the data are, sampling
method if applied, how the data are collected, and how the data are
analyzed? What theories/models the paper has applied and/or tried to
develop?
1.5. Results, Discussions, and Conclusions. How are the results presented?
What is the answer to the research question? What are the major findings?
Does the paper have a discussion or similar section? What’s addressed in that
section? Does the section cite literature?
1.6. Contributions. What is the major contribution of the study?
Section 2. Critical Analysis
This section contains your analysis of the paper. It may contain the following
paragraphs if applicable:
2.1 Overall Assessment. Is the paper easy to read? Why? Did the author do a
good job to elaborate the research problems? Why? Why has this paper been
accepted and published? What are the strengths of the paper (think about
originality, appropriateness, quality of research design, quality of the data, and
quality of writing)?
2.2 Research Methodology. Do you understand the research design? If yes, do
you think the design appropriate for the research problem? If no, do you want
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to know more about the research design? Has the author taken any
strategies/efforts to ensure reliability and validity of the study results? If yes,
how?
2.3 Future Research. Can the paper be further improved? If yes, how? What will
you do differently if you are going to do a similar study? Is there a study can
be done to continue the study in the paper or to mimic the study but for a
different information/research problem?
2.4 New Knowledge Learned. Is there anything new that you have learned from
this paper? What interests you the most? Anything that you want to know
more?
Section 3. Questions to Discuss
I would like you to list 2 questions that you would like to discuss by the class.