Writing the Literature Review Section: Teaching Undergraduate Psychology Students Scientific Writing

Many undergraduate psychology students write the literature review section of a scientific paper as a list of summaries without direction or coherence. This paper proposes to teach students to write the literature review section as an argument instead of following the traditional hourglass metaphor approach. One of the required courses in the psychology undergraduate curriculum is the research methods course. This course teaches students the process of conducting an experiment and includes the writing of a scientific report. This requirement reflects the emphasis of scientific method and reasoning in the field of psychology. In order for psychology undergraduates to understand the subject, students need to know how to conduct research and report their findings. A research methods course teaches students to write an empirical paper, starting with a literature review section according to the format laid out by the publication manual issued by the American Psychological Association (APA). The purpose of the literature review section is to provide the reasoning for the study by reviewing past findings. It also provides the rationale for the experiment and establishes the importance of the experiment. One of the most commonly encountered problems when teaching students to write the literature review is that students often adopt a sequential summary style of writing. In other words, the literature review section often begins with a short introduction section, a series of research studies and their summaries, and a final concluding paragraph that includes the hypotheses. Students often fail to connect the list of study summaries together and state how these studies relate to the main purpose of the paper. The literature review section thus reads much as a list or an annotated bibliography without a coherent argument for the importance of the experiment. This paper seeks to identify the problem for this form of writing behavior and proposes a pedagogical direction that would help students write a more coherent literature review section in their research papers. Argumentative Versus Expository Text Structure An empirical paper within the field of psychology is generally divided into three major sections, including (a) the literature review and references, (b) method and results, and (c) discussion and limitations. Students are taught to follow an “hourglass” structure when writing a scientific paper, where the literature review section would start broadly and end with a narrow and specific hypothesis (Bem, 2004; Schulte, 2003). The end of the literature review section would thus be toward the middle of the hourglass where the hourglass is the narrowest. Although the hourglass visual illustration is useful, it does not necessarily help students operationalize the individual steps in constructing the literature review section and convey the purpose of the literature review. Most students, before taking the research methods course, have not practiced writing empirical research papers and do not know how to approach the task (McCarthy, 1987). It is thus the instructor’s job to define and teach the structure of a literature review section at the beginning of the semester. The literature review section of an empirical paper should argue for the importance and relevance of the studies conducted (Hart, 1998). The literature review section should therefore have an argumentative structure instead of any other