A teaching intervention to help undergraduates learn to write literature review papers is described.As a means of teaching undergraduates in an abnormal --psychology class to write scholarly literature review papers, I developed a series of presentations and exercises to address typical student difficulties in completing such an assignment. First, I prepared several minilectures to clarify the nature of the assignment, which was to write a review of the scholarly literature on a topic relevant to the course (using a minimum of 10 data-based articles ~ublished within the Dreceding 10 years). I devoted portions of several class periods to discussing the following issues: What a scholarly literature review is. how to distinguish between scholarlv sources and u popular press periodicals, the nature of the library search process, how to use abstracting services, appropriate use of quoted material, how to reference studies in APA style, what constitutes ~lagiarism, and how to write an abstract for . a journal article. In preparing my discussion of these topics, I relied o n material presented in Rosnow and Rosnow ( 1986); Maimon, Belcher, Hearn, Nodine, and O'Connor (198 1); and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (3rd ed.; APA, 1983).T o teach students to formulate a topic, summarize articles, and integrate findings from several sources, I designed a series of overlapping writing assignments intended to shape the major skills needed in writing a literature review. I did not grade any of the writing assignments leading up to the final paper. Instead, students were able to get "free" feedback (i.e., with no effect on their course grades) simply by turning in assignments as requested. Although completion of the assignments was optional, nearly all students turned in each assignment. > The sequence of writing assignments was as follows.1. Focused freewriting. Because Maimon et al. (1981) and Schor and Summerfield (1986) recommended focused freewriting as a way to begin writing, I asked students to write one paragraph on each of three topics they might be interested in researching for the paper assignment. Each paragraph was to include a description of the topic, why the student was interested in that topic, and how the student expected to benefit from researching that t o~i c . 2. Summarization of an essay. A t the beginning of a class period, students wrote summaries of a short essay (fewer than 1.000 words) I had ~h o t o c o~i e d from a read-;rigs book. he article I selected was a'n argumentative essay on a nontechnical-topic unrelated to abnormal psychology. After discussing the qualities of good and bad summaries and providing examples of both (cf. Maimon et al., 1981, pp. 102-107), I asked students to write a one-paragraph summary of the key points of the essay. I then gave them a summary I had written of the same essay and offered students suggestions for evaluating the quality of their own summaries. In particular, 1 asked them to note whether they had idendied the main points as w...
This article provides a bibliography of published journal articles on careers for psychology majors. It includes references on employment and job satisfaction among psychology baccalaureates and those with graduate degrees in psychology.
This article describes the development of a psychology careers decision tree. Especially in departments with heavy advising loads, using a psychology careers decision tree can be an effective time-management technique for advisers. In addition, students who use the decision tree may benefit by learning more about their career options and by acquiring better question-asking skills.
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