: literature review
The assignment requirements
Your literature review, therefore, is to research and report into particular aspects of the TFV. Your
assignment is split into two parts.
Part A
What is the history of the TFV? How did it come about, where, and when? What has been this
historical purpose of the TFV?
Part B
Part B provides you with a choice; you may research or report on either one of the following:
The extent to which the Australian regulatory environment for financial reporting supports the TFV, or
Whether the current requirements of the Australian accounting standards to “faithfully represent” the
reporting entity’s accounts is the same as requiring a true and fair view.
Some links to journal articles will be provided below to help you start your research, but you will
have to search much further than that. Your textbook can also provide some useful references, and I
urge you to search the Library’s database for useful articles.
You may certainly work with other students to share the research and discuss the best ways to
present the report, but keep in mind that this is an individual assignment. So work with others, share
notes, and so on, but you must write your own report.
Report format
A literature review is simply a review of a relevant body of literature. It differs from a regular report
because a literature review does not make recommendations or find an answer to a problem. What it
does is, for a particular topic, find all the relevant literature and summarises it for the reader. Your
textbook, by Craig Deegan, is a form of literature review (actually a lot of them: each chapter is its
own literature review). The reader of a literature review receives a guided tour of current knowledge.
I want you to keep your literature review presentation simple. A simple report layout is sufficient,
even though you will not be presenting a report. Here is a guide on how to set out your literature
review:
Title
Provide a useful title that helps the reader know from the start what he or she is about to read.
Synopsis (also known as an Executive Summary)
Use the synopsis to summarise your topic and the key points of what you found in the literature
about your topic. This should be no more than two paragraphs. Professional writers usually write this
last.
Introduction
This is not the same as a synopsis. An introduction should be a roadmap to your entire report: what
the topic was, where you searched, what you found, what the key points are.
An introduction can take up to half a page. Write this after the literature review and conclusion
sections, but before the synopsis.
Literature review (2,500 words max)
This is where you report, in your own words, what the literature says. Make sure you clearly break this
up into:
Part A with Part A title
Part B with Part B title (that should clearly indicate which choice you made).
You may decide who much of the 2,500 words you place into each part. The golden rules for
knowing if you have enough are:
There must be enough words to get the marks you need, and
They mustn’t be boring or confusing to read. A whole jumble of words and paragraphs that were
placed into the report to make up the word count won’t please a marker who has to “hunt and peck”
to find relevant passages. And we don’t want a cranky marker, do we?
I would therefore urge you to think less of word count and think more of telling a clear story in your
report. If you find that you don’t have enough words, consider whether you have done enough
research. If you have exceeded the word limit, consider whether you have clarity in your writing. The
only way to do this is to reread your report several times before submitting.
Conclusion
This wraps up (summarises) the key points of the literature review. Use this section to conclusively
and clearly respond to the requirements of the topic.
References
Place your references here. I expect quite a few. Each reference listed here must also have a citation
within the text of your literature review. The reverse is also true: every citation of a source within your
literature review must point to a reference here in your reference list.
The assessment criteria
As you can probably guess, there is no single “correct” answer for this assignment, although there
can be many “incorrect” answers. You will be assessed on:
the quality of your scholarship (research, processing information, and finally the ability to present
what your found out in a useful way) (80%)
the quality of your English expression (10%)
the quality (readability) of your presentation (10%).
You may use either the Harvard or APA referencing style for this assignment, but you must be
consistent and you must reference all sources of your information. A failure to reference properly will
attract penalties of up to 5 marks.
Plagiarism or academic misconduct (such as using someone else to write your assignment) will attract
worse penalties.
References
Nobes, CW & Parker, RH 1991, ‘“True and Fair”: A Survey of Uk Financial Directors’, Journal of
Business Finance and Accounting, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 359–375.
