So messy isn’t it…

As I discovered more and more sources related my topic, student engagement in on-campus programs, it came to me that I had to organize all of these into one single conversation. Obviously not all of the articles were made to talk directly to each other, but they all do share a specific place in the academic world and are contributing to the same topic in a way.

In class, are professor told us to map the articles we had found at that point visually. That is why this post starts out with a picture of my terrible handwriting. This actually turned out to be very helpful. I organized the sources based on how they relate to each other, as you can see in the picture. For example, I was able to see that one source actually was similar to the theory of another one, but differed in their academic disciplines. Another, which was a case study, seemed like a prime example of the techniques another source explained. All of the articles, each completely unrelated in terms of where I found them, actually had many connections in various ways.

These connections are crucial. By mapping articles, we can start to grasp the holistic conversation regarding a certain topic. In my case, some were based on quantitative studies on student involvement, some were case studies of specific programs at universities, and others were opinion papers from experts of certain fields. By understanding how they all connect to each other, I was able to take my first step towards synthesizing all my findings.

True even for writing. (Source)