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5.5: Summary of Reviewing the Literature

  • Page ID
    240740
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    Key Takeaways

    • Your librarian and library databases are critical tools for finding research literature on your topic.
    • Secondary sources like websites and review articles may be useful at the beginning of your literature review, but you should focus your search on empirical (primary source) research articles that have been peer-reviewed.
    • Research articles have a typical structure that can help you learn to read them: introduction, methods, results, conclusion, references.
    • Determine your own strategy for reading scientific articles.
    • To interpret the results of quantitative research articles, it's important to remember that null hypotheses state that nothing is happening, and that p-values show the probability that the null hypothesis is true. This is the basis of null hypothesis significance testing.
    • Another key ot interpreting the results of quantitative research articles is to focus on the original research questions so that you don't get overwhelmed with all of the statistical analyses provided.
    • There are resources if you get stuck when interpreting the results of a scientific research article, including that article's discussion section, professors in the field, or behavioral statistics tutors.

    What's Next?

    This chapter gave you a refresher on interpreting statistics to help you understand research articles. Next, we focus more on understanding statistical analyses and what they can tell us.

    Exercises
    • Practice: Try to find an empirical article (primary source) on "study skills" using your library's databases.
    • Practice: With an empirical (primary source) article that you have found, identify the parts of the introduction section, method section, the results, and the parts of the discussion section.
    • Practice: Imagine a study measured growth mindset and how long the high student participants spent on their math homework. What’s the null hypothesis for scoring higher on growth mindset (compared to the population of high school students) and how long students spent on their homework?
    • Practice: Does a true null hypothesis say a sample mean and the population mean are similar or different?
    • Practice: If we’re saying that the sample is probably different from the population, are we rejecting or retaining (failing to reject) the null hypothesis?
    • Discussion: Imagine a study showing that people who eat more broccoli tend to be happier. Explain for someone who knows nothing about statistics how this could be tested through null hypothesis signficance testing?
    • Discussion: Imagine that you conduct a t-test to compare the final grade percentage of students who go to tutoring to students (average grade of 93.3%) who did not go to tutoring (average grade of 71.7%). If the p value was p=.02, would you retain or reject (fail to retain) the null hypothesis? Would you recommend that the school continue to hire tutors; why or why not?

    This page titled 5.5: Summary of Reviewing the Literature is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Rajiv S. Jhangiani, I-Chant A. Chiang, Carrie Cuttler, & Dana C. Leighton via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.