The purpose of this assignment is to take the next month to slowly methodically critique four (4) peer-reviewed articles from the scholarly literature. The literature critiques will focus in on ONE topic area of rehabilitation that interests you.

Download Assignment 2: Road to Research Prospectus here: Assignment 2 Road_Research_Prospectus.pdfPreview the document

The assignment is also outlined below if you prefer.

The purpose of this assignment is to take the next month to slowly methodically critique four (4) peer-reviewed articles from the scholarly literature. The literature critiques will focus in on ONE topic area of rehabilitation that interests you. All four (4) articles explore one consistent topic area: which means you must first select the topic area. Then, each of the four selected peer-reviewed articles should explore some aspect of that same topic area.

What is a Scholarly Article? (Video)

General Directions for Identifying a Topic Area for Assignment 2
Step 1:
Identify an area of Rehab that interests you. It needs to be a topic area of rehab that has some available peer-reviewed literature AND the topic needs to intrigue you enough that you’re willing to stick with it for the next two months!

Step 2:
develop a couple tentative broad research questions or hypotheses on the topic area you selected. Know this – you WILL tweak, rework/reword, operationalize and define the questions as you explore the literature. (Remember the multiple revisions we did in the lecture notes?).

Step 3:
conduct a library search of the topic area to find peer-reviewed articles on the topic area. Review the
article abstracts first to help determine which articles you want to fully read. Think of a literature review as an inverted triangle – it starts broad and then becomes more specific or focused.

Step 4:
Choose peer-reviewed articles that are valuable to you and your topic area of interest. Create and save each article critique as a separate Microsoft word document (you will submit 4 critique documents to the drop box area).

Step 5:
Use the following 10 questions to critique EACH of the four (4) peer-reviewed articles you select:

Peer-Reviewed Article Critique Questions
State your initial research problem/question or research hypothesis area

Full citation and name of the article selected?
How well did the researchers identify the concern/gap/need for this research? How could you tell?
What are the main research questions?
What was the identified population being researched?
What methods for data collection were used?
What analysis of the data was conducted? Quantitative or qualitative? Did it seem rigorous? Explain.
Identify some of the key results. Include effect size, correlation values, other supporting statistics if available, or identify major themes established if qualitative.
Based on questions 1-6, what is your personal critique of the research? What is your major takeaway from this study? Do you believe it is quality research? Why?
Ideas for future research (from the literature or your own ideas).
Revised research questions or IF-THEN hypotheses that came to mind when I read this article (1-2 questions).
EXAMPLE research critique can be found here: Research Critique Example DocumentPreview the document

Upload the four research critiques in this drop box area.
Each critique is worth 25 points.