500

1. Purposes of a Literature Review.

We review literature in an area of research interest in order to understand what is known and not known already in the area. Ultimately all education research connects to and is compared with previous studies that have been reported. Further, as we have pointed out in the Overview to this Module, literature reviewing is in itself a form of research, in particular document analysis. So there is no escape — reviewing the literature is an integral part of understanding and conducting education research. Readpages 1-3 of the excerpt from Hart titled “Writing the review, and pages 1-4 of the Hart excerpt titled “The role of the literature review” (Read pp. 78-102 in Gay, Mills, and Airasian 2009). Compare what these authors have to say about the various purposes for conducting a review of literature, and the significance and value of the literature review as part of the research process. Keep these purposes in mind as you complete Activities 1 in this Module.

2. Distinguishing Elements of the Review Process.

In this activity we focus on the structure, organization, and presentation of a literature review. The goal of this activity is to provide you with some tools and an approach you can use to evaluate the qualities of literature reviews that you will read in this course and in the future. These same tools and approach will be useful when you plan and write your own literature reviews. To be a critical reader (and writer) of literature reviews you need to be aware of, and able to recognize the key elements that make up the review process. The four key elements of the review process are: Summary, Analysis, Synthesis, and Critique. These are described in the table that follows.

Key Element of the Review Process

Summary: Reviewer reports on what, when, how research was conducted; provides overview of the literature and research.

Analysis: Reviewer selects, differentiates, dissects, breaks apart; unpacks something into its constituent parts in order to infer or determine the relationship and/or organizing principles between them; thereby isolating the main variables.

Synthesis: Reviewer integrates, combines, recasts, formulates, reorganizes; rearranges the elements derived from analysis to identify relationships or show main organizing principles or show how these principles can be used to make a different phenomenon. Reviewer determines what messages emerge from literature.

Critique: Reviewer scrutinizes literature and research for faulty assumptions, questionable logic, weakness in methodology, inappropriate data analysis, and unwarranted conclusions.

These elements bring structure to a literature review and their presence determines the qualities of any given review. Learning to read and prepare literature reviews begins with recognizing these key elements of the review process.

Note that distinguishing between review elements that represent Summary and Synthesis may seem confusing at first glance. To clarify, the term “Summary” is being used here to indicate places in the review where the author is summarizing aspects of a single study within the review. The term “Synthesis” refers to places in the review where the author is bringing together ideas from a number of studies he or she has summarized and/or critiqued in their review article. We recognize this application of these terms may be a bit different than how you have used them in the past. The definitions being applied here are intended to provide a structure to help you examine and analyze a review article.

Procedure:

• Begin by reading the introductory section to the paper (pages 273-274 in MacArthur et al., 2001) to provide you with the context of this literature review. Think about what these authors are ‘doing’ (in terms of organizing their writing) in this introduction to set up the rest of their review.
• Summary Task: Individually post to the “Module 3: Lesson 1-Literature Review” Discussion Forum a short statement summarizing one or two ideas or issues you discovered from this analysis activity. Some issues you might comment on include: What else is present in a review besides the four key elements we searched for? Where does each of these elements occur in this review? Is their an overall sequence, pattern, or plan evident in the structure of the review?

3. Conducting an Analysis of a Literature Review.

Literature reviews like other published forms of research should be read with a critical eye. Again the best way to do this is in a systematic fashion. We have created a Checklist for Analyzing a Literature Review that you can use for evaluating the qualities of a literature review.

Read Lauman’s article (in the Custom Copy Package) and assess the quality of this review using the ETEC 500 Checklist for Analyzing a Literature Review Write a short statement (250-word maximum) analyzing the quality of this literature review and post it. In your statement highlight both the strengths of the literature review and the areas needing further work.

For further ideas on how to critique research we recommend you read Chapter 22, pages 532-542 (2009) in Gay, Mills, and Airasian. They provide an array of evaluative questions you can use to judge individual research reports or reviews.