Abstract
Crafting and effective literature review remains an important part of thinking and writing as a Political Scientist. Teaching students the skills needed to write quality literature reviews is not easy. Students often lack the necessary experience and frames of reference for understanding the process. In this chapter we describe and evaluate three pedagogical tools we have developed to help students tackle the dreaded literature review, specifically the ability to summarize research in their own words and to weave multiple findings into a coherent narrative. We find that utilizing these heuristics resulted improvements in student self-reported perceptions as well as the quality of their writing.