This in-class literature review assignment was submitted by Professor Alyson Ma from the Economics department. She uses this assignment in her ECON 497 Senior Seminar course. You can find detailed information about this exercise and download the assignment handout here.

Since economics papers are often incredibly technical, Professor Ma created this two-part assignment to help students do the following:

1.  Frame their thoughts about the topic of interest
2. Critically read the literature
3. Determine how they may contribute to the existing literature

In the first part of the assignment, students use boxes to visualize and organize the relationships between certain factors and their topic of interest.

The second part of the assignment focuses on theoretical concepts and dependent and independent variables. Professor Ma explains how this part “helps the students to quantify the factors for the empirical analysis.”