Question: Your task this week is to prepare a draft of your Signature Assignment: Scholarly Literature Review.

Start with the annotated outline you created in Week 8. Ensure you have incorporated any faculty feedback and that your topics (and subtopics) are in a logical order.

Next, using your outline, you will expand into a paper format by discussing the relationships between your scholarly sources.

Be sure to address the following:

- Determine the commonalities among the articles for each (sub)topic identified in your outline. For example, did authors use similar frameworks, materials, or participants? Are any studies an extension of another?

- Determine the differences that exist among the articles for each (sub)topic that you identified in your outline. If there are contradictory findings, you may (or may not) be able to identify methodological differences that could account for the contradiction (e.g., differences in measurements or participant demographics).

- Select general conclusions you can report about a subtopic, given the relationships you inferred from the group of articles within each subtopic.

- Consider the relationships between scholarly sources within each subtopic and drawn conclusions within each subtopic. If you take a step back and look at the entire group of subtopics and your work thus far, what overall general conclusions can you draw? Some questions to consider include:

1) What are some general observations on the topic?

2) Are there overall themes or patterns in the literature?

3) Do the patterns or themes suggest future areas of inquiry? In this process, did you discover that you need to return to the literature and search for additional resources? Please explain.

Ensure that you identify and consider to the theoretical frameworks presented in the literature you are reviewing (see Bloomberg & Volpe, 2008; Ridley, 2012). In this paper, focus on synthesizing the literature, as well as providing a critical analysis of the literature from at least 15 peer-reviewed sources (see readings from this week and Ridley, Chapter 8-regarding analysis and synthesis).

Avoid simply describing one study per paragraph: Your goal is an integrated synthesis of concepts, ideas, and findings. The last few paragraphs of the review should summarize the trends in the literature that you have observed and build a bridge to the need for additional research within the area.