Posted: September 28th, 2016

You are required to undertake a critical appraisal of the study you have been assigned to, using an appropriate critical appraisal tool (e.g. CASP) as a guide to your writing

You are required to undertake a critical appraisal of the study you have been assigned to, using an appropriate critical appraisal tool (e.g. CASP) as a guide to your writing. At the end of the appraisal you must rank the study using a hierarchy of evidence (e.g. Harbour and Miller 2001). You must not submit a critique of your use of the CASP (or other) tool as your main body of work. For this assessment you are required to critically appraise the evidence you have been allocated. Critical Appraisal Exercise (750 words): For this assessment you are required to critically appraise the evidence you have been allocated. You must not submit a critique such as CASP.as your main body of work. Checklist (delete this text box prior to submission) Generally the aim of the literature review section of any assignment is to: � Consider what do the findings of the evidence suggest in terms of answering your aims, e.g. whether treatment A is more effective than treatment B? (We have considered formulating aims and used the P.I.C.O tool in discussion boards prior to this assessment). � It also needs to consider and reflect on how that informs practice � the focus of the assignment and how does it compare to current practice? � Then it should consider whether the evidence is rigorous enough for you to accept and apply those findings to answering the aim and practice. When you are actually critically appraising the evidence you need to: � Start this exercise by informing your marker which critiquing tool and hierarchy of evidence you will be using to aid you in this task. You may place copies of these in the appendix (not included in the word count), but they must be referenced correctly within the main text and reference list. � Always introduce the evidence by providing author(s), date, type of study, and aim of study. � Discuss the strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages of the study methodology, considering their relevance to EBP and if applicable to your clinical practice. � Analyse and synthesize the sample: inclusion / exclusion criteria; generalisability to clinical practice; sample size; power calculations etc. � Avoid description, you don�t gain marks for this � You can use tables to provide descriptive text about the research however, these are not compulsory (examples of these can be found in �Course Information � Resources for Studying�. In the main text you MUST analyse, synthesize and evaluate the evidence. � Provide your analysis (not the researchers or other authors); you gain marks for your comments and reflections, not theirs. � Use the key research terms in your analysis­ these are rigour, bias, (internal or external) validity and reliability etc., these are defined in this module. � Always include specific results for quantitative and /or qualitative evidence, to inform argument. Consider and show understanding of statistical tools used (what do they measure? Is the appropriate tool used? etc.) and the results they produce. � If possible, create an argument and reflect on specific examples from clinical practice. � You need to challenge the evidence, don�t accept it at face value. Just because it is published,