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The following is an illustration of how you can cover the academic literature in a

concise and relevant way. This is particularly important when your assignment requires
a relatively small word count.

To be able to do this you need to be able to:


• Identify the key themes and ideas in each article
• Be able to spot the themes that are related across some or all of the articles
• Understand what the ideas actually mean

Understanding is important because as Einstein said:


"If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough".
Implied in this is that if you do not understand the material properly then you do not
know what to include and what to leave out.

The articles that you are likely to find or that have been supplied, are likely to have a
number of ideas or themes that are common to some or all of them. A simple thing to do
is list all the ideas that you find in each article. Let's say that this leaves you with 30
ideas that you have identified in 6 articles. You should then group the ones together
that are related in some way. You will then end up with (maybe) 4 or 5 themes which
you can then summarise.

Let's imagine that I have read 5 articles about student attendance and engagement. I
have listed all the ideas and identified 3 common themes:

• Issues relating to time management


• Issues relating to Motivation
• Issues relating to understanding of the material

I could then easily construct a 'review' of each theme (note that this is an example and
is fictional!):

"Research across the sector indicates that one of the major issues in student
attainment is related to poor time management and poor time keeping. This is likely to
result in late submission, rushed assignments, lack of thorough exploration of the
subject and poor preparation for learning sessions (Kennedy 2012, Burns 2015, Parrot
2014). Additional and related issues may be reported such as higher levels of stress and
withdrawal from studies at various stages in the degree programme (Lewis 2013,
Wilkinson et al. 2014)".

This covers a wide range of research and tells us what we need to know about the
research findings. If we want more information, we can check the articles, as they are
cited in the reference list.

Here is a bad version of the same:

"In his article about students success and failure, Kennedy (2012) tells us that there
are many things that lead to failure. In his research, that was conducted in a two year
period between 2009 and 2010, Kennedy interviewed 300 students in a number of
different Universities. He also interviewed 150 academic staff in the same institutions.
He asked the students the following questions..............................."

As you can see this would take a lot of space to get to anything that is useful. All it has
done so far is to say what one of the authors did (very narrative) and it is still a long
way from getting to any of the key points. If this is done for all the articles then you
would use all the word limit and get nowhere near achieving anything meaningful.

Less is more if it is relevant and meaningful! Below is a 6 word novel. Legendary


American author, Ernest Hemmingway allegedly won a bet to write a story in 6 words.
The story is tragic and moving and is done in 6 words....(he won his bet).

“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn”

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