Literature Review
Major assignment three is the literature review. For this assignment, I constructed a prompt that separates and explains the information for students in what I believe is an accessible way. To achieve this, I did my best to distil the activity of creating a literature review into its most basic elements in order to deliver a more digestible prompt to students so that they may focus on the function of the synthesis rather than all the particulars of its form. I built my assignment and my prompt to fully accommodate the contextual considerations of the course, which include the obvious fact that most of the students are hearing the word “literature review” for the first time.
As Writing about Writing stresses an overall lessened focus on form and a heightened focus on content, I want students to be able to understand as completely as possible what they are meant to be doing in the assignment, which meant removing emphasis on form. As students are conditioned to focus on form expectations in assignment prompts, I hope to encourage focus on the important goals of the literature review by providing a document that explains the guts of a literature review as accessibly as possible. Accessibility in our prompts is so important because not only does accommodation support the learning goals of everyone, students are also in need of accommodation for their lack of prior experience in the activity.
I ground the concept of a literature review in real world experience by comparing the literature review to a social conversation in which each friend must offer an opinion and support it, and a new arrival gets a recap of each opinion before the conversation continues. By embedding the activity in the students' lived experience in this way, they are more likely to absorb the process on an intuitive level and perform the task from a place of genuine understanding. This approach is also intended to maximize transferability. By offering students a new perspective, they are more likely to succeed in abstracting the principles of the literature review.
As Writing about Writing stresses an overall lessened focus on form and a heightened focus on content, I want students to be able to understand as completely as possible what they are meant to be doing in the assignment, which meant removing emphasis on form. As students are conditioned to focus on form expectations in assignment prompts, I hope to encourage focus on the important goals of the literature review by providing a document that explains the guts of a literature review as accessibly as possible. Accessibility in our prompts is so important because not only does accommodation support the learning goals of everyone, students are also in need of accommodation for their lack of prior experience in the activity.
I ground the concept of a literature review in real world experience by comparing the literature review to a social conversation in which each friend must offer an opinion and support it, and a new arrival gets a recap of each opinion before the conversation continues. By embedding the activity in the students' lived experience in this way, they are more likely to absorb the process on an intuitive level and perform the task from a place of genuine understanding. This approach is also intended to maximize transferability. By offering students a new perspective, they are more likely to succeed in abstracting the principles of the literature review.
