An Instructional Approach for Improving the Writing of Literature Reviews

The authors engaged in a team-teaching approach to foster improvements in the writing and evaluation of scholarly literature reviews by their graduate students in music education. A focal point of the semester-long project was the analysis and public critique of each author's dissertation literature review by the other author, using a variant of a rubric for evaluating literature reviews by Boote and Beile. Students further refined the rubric by evaluating literature reviews in current music education journals and then used the rubric to guide their own writing. Student reflections and responses were gathered through questionnaires and interviews, with indications that the process had a twofold effect: (a) improved skills in conceptualizing, writing, and analyzing literature reviews and (b) increased collegiality as students perceived their instructors as peer scholars.