Overview
Please choose one of the following five questions:
1. How effective are lifestyle interventions (e.g., physical activity, healthy eating, social connections) in managing behavioural and psychological symptoms for people with dementia?
2. Are there ethnic differences in levels of loneliness in the UK population?
3. Is acceptance and commitment therapy effective in reducing anxiety among autistic people?
4. Which mental health disorders or symptoms are most strongly associated with youth offending?
5. Are people who have asthma more likely to develop a psychotic illness than people who do not?
Your individual assignment, which must be your own unaided work to be submitted via Turnitin, will be due on Monday 26th January 2026, 5pm
Your individual assignment should include these elements:
(a) A protocol in the Prospero format for a systematic review to address the above question (maximum 2500 words including key decision section).
(b) The search terms that you propose to use in your search and the databases to be searched.
(c) Notes of up to 1,000 words on the key decisions that you have made in designing your protocol and search, the basis on which you have made these, and the main likely strengths and weaknesses of your review.
(d) A description of numbers of papers retrieved by running your search on two databases.
(e) Tables showing the study characteristics and results for five papers that have been retrieved by the search and meet the eligibility criteria for your review. These should include data on important aspects of the studies that are likely to be relevant to assessing quality, and on key outcomes. Note that you are not expected to carry out a full screening of papers retrieved by your search – stop once you have found and extracted data from five relevant ones.
Guidance notes for registering a systematic review protocol with PROSPERO can be found here: http://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/documents/Regis... (the PDF is already available under the session 9 tab).
These guidelines demonstrate the format and details for some of the sections that we would expect to see in your protocol assignment.
This assignment is CATEGORY 2 for AI use
Category 2. AI tools can be used in an assistive role*
Students are permitted to use AI tools for specific defined processes within the assessment.
AI tools can be utilised to enhance and support the development of specific skills in specific ways, as specified by the tutor and required by the assessment. For instance, students might use AI for tasks such as data analysis, pattern recognition, or generating insights.
Acknowledging the use of generative AI in academic work
The use of GenAI must be acknowledged in an ‘Appendix’ or 'Methods' section of any piece of academic work where it has been used as a functional tool to assist in the process of creating academic work.
Minimum requirement to include in acknowledgement:
Name and version of the GenAI system used; e.g. Microsoft Copilot (version GPT-4); ChatGPT-3.5
Publisher (company that made the |GenAI system); e.g. Microsoft; OpenAI
URL of the GenAI system.
Brief description (single sentence) of context in which the tool was used.
For example:
I acknowledge the use of Microsoft Copilot (version GPT-4, Microsoft, https://copilot.microsoft.com/) to summarise my initial notes and to proofread my final draft.
Just a reminder about some points:
We have the kept the questions somewhat broad so that the student can make their own interpretation; so long as you provide sound justification and rationale for your decisions then you should be fine
The reference style (where applicable) is APA
The headings are included in the word count
Your data extraction tables are not included in the overall word count but your search terms are
Please do not worry if your similarity score is high when you are submitting your systematic review protocol to Turnitin, it is typical for this assignment due to the PROSPERO and table headings. The markers will not be concerned about this, they focus more on chunks of text that have been copied or not cited correctly.
PLEASE DO NOT PUT YOUR NAMES ON THE ASSIGNMENT, use your ID instead.
Please post your assignment questions on the Moodle forum below, do not email these.
Questions regarding the assignment will only be answered up until five days before the assignment. Any questions posted on the Moodle forum after this will go unanswered. This is to be fair to students who have completed their assignments early.
Word count penalties are as follows:
For work that exceeds a specified maximum length by less than 10% the mark will be reduced by five percentage marks, but the penalised mark will not be reduced below the pass mark, assuming the work merited a Pass.
For work that exceeds a specified maximum length by 10% or more, the mark will be reduced by ten percentage marks, but the penalised mark will not be reduced below the pass mark, assuming the work merited a Pass.
This means that if you go one word over you will be penalised 5 per cent or 10 per cent depending on how much you've gone
To check your similarity score on Turnitin, go to your Moodle Home page, scroll down to the bottom of the page, look under the ‘student help’ section, then select ‘Turnitin Similarity Checker'
NOTE: THIS IS NOT THE LINK TO THE FINAL SUBMISSION!
Here is a good example of it: PROSPERO
There are some documents about it.