| Description |
Transitioning from undergraduate to graduate study, students must master critical reading of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary literature, interpret primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, and synthesize the literature.1 Demonstrating an understanding of the literature in a particular field provides evidence that a graduate student has the ability to progress to the next stage of conducting research.2 Despite this being a critical skill, doctoral committees, faculty, editors, and publishers often contend that literature reviews are inadequate and poorly written.3 The expectations for the literature review and dissertation process are often implicit and difficult for graduate students to navigate.4 Using research tools, such as qualitative data analysis tools, to encourage graduate students to practice critical reading skills is one strategy to make the literature review reading process more explicit and help them organize, analyze, and visualize the scholarly sources they will use in their literature review process. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how to use several qualitative research tools, such as Voyant-Tools, NVivo, or ATLAS.ti, to teach graduate students how to structure their reading processes more effectively. |
