This activity helps students build key research and writing skills – close reading, summarising, paraphrasing, and citation – while collaborating on a shared literature review matrix. It supports preparation for class discussions or literature reviews by encouraging synthesis across sources and peer learning.

• Can be done synchronously during a class session.
• Microsoft Word online and any other tool that lets multiple people work on the same document.

Here is an example of a Literature Matrix that was created and shared by Roberta Kjesrud. Please see below for Roberta’s explanation of the thinking behind this:

Scaffolding Synthesis: Rationale for an Advanced Literature Review Matrix, by Roberta Kjesrud

Since literature reviews are a common research-based writing assignment in upper division writing courses at Western Washington University, I have been supporting students writing them for nearly 30 years. Especially since these assignments (and the accompanying reading-research burden) are so intimidating, I really love Jasmina Najjar’s collaborative literature review matrix to scaffold students in collaboratively understanding and summarizing sources. I love the idea of using this tool as a kind of jigsaw to add deeper comprehension to dense texts; further, a collaborative approach allows students a low-risk way to use their voices in interpreting research.

I think there are additional ways we can build out a matrix to scaffold students in doing the high-level analysis, evaluation, and synthesis expected in literature reviews. Many faculty think that assigning an annotated bibliography can act as an interim scaffold, but other than adding accountability for research/reading progress, I don’t think faculty find it acts to scaffold literature reviews that meet their expectations. Faculty are often dismayed when students cobble those annotation paragraphs together into an elaborate summary I call ‘The Shopping List’: Source A says X, Source B says Y, Source C says Z. The Shopping List paper is woefully devoid of the critical analysis/synthesis moves that faculty want to promote.

Over the years, I’ve wondered what it would take to move students more from a discrete Shopping List to a synthesized Path of Claims. I’ve become convinced of two gaps: a lack of knowing that they have agency (as a student, who am I to forward or counter the experts?) and a lack of knowing how to make thinking and writing moves across Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy. Students seem most comfortable with two moves, the kind they might make in discussing a movie they just saw: I just saw a movie that X (plot summary), and it was awful (judgment without evaluation).

Although students are practiced in summary and judgment, these moves aren’t ideal for literature reviews. So I’ve developed a tool intended to scaffold students in analysis, evaluation (with evidence), and synthesis. Hopefully in working through this tool, students can go beyond descriptive statements of each individual source to a more collective birds-eye view of what a body of literature is telling scholars about what we know/don’t know about a line of inquiry. My goal in using this matrix tool (still a work in progress!) is to help students realize they have valuable perspectives to offer and to demonstrate show, not tell how to practice moving beyond summary into a full continuum of thinking and writing moves, thus equipping them for success as professionals and as lifelong learners.