First, a summary:
It seemed from the readings this week that the way in which a literature review is defined depends on the purpose of the review, and that purpose can differ between the purpose of the review and the audience who will read it. Boote and Beile (2005) and Maxwell (2006) disagree fundamentally on the purpose of a dissertation, and therefore disagree on the purpose the literature review serves. For Boote and Beile, the purpose of the dissertation is to demonstrate one's knowledge of their field in order to show their expertise. Maxwell discusses the dissertation as another important research paper, and therefore the literature reviewed must be relevant to advance a specific argument in a specific part of the field. The difference between these two types of literature reviews highlight a movement within many doctoral programs, but the guidelines each present are useful in their own right.
As Anderson and Kanuka (2003) discuss how the Internet has impacted the researcher and research process, they discuss both the wealth of knowledge a researcher has access to and the importance of narrowing one's search to the relevant literature. They go so far as to state that a researcher can focus on the literature from their field, effectively ignoring research in other fields (p. 45). While this may be helpful in the initial search for relevant literature, but the researcher would do well to recognize the places outside their field where relevant literature may also reside.
The problems and techniques posed by these authors bring forth the need for a researcher to use some kind of reference management system both to collect resources and sort, tag, and annotate resources for easier access and synthesis.
And now, a reflection:
While Boote and Beile's guidelines and rubric are helpful for guiding the process of writing a broad literature review, it seems that in many fields using relevant literature to advance an argument may be more appropriate for the kinds of dissertations being required in many fields. Working from anecdotal evidence, it seems that many programs are moving toward dissertations that are comprised of a certain number of published/publishable articles around a theme, which would seem to necessitate a literature review more along the lines of what Maxwell proposes.
Personally, I have found Maxwell's suggestions to be quite productive, giving me focus in the broad task of reviewing the literature. I have written several focused literature reviews, using Zotero to organize and annotate appropriate articles. Now that I am writing up my early inquiry project, I am drawing from the text of those reviews and my notes in Zotero to synthesize what I know about the field of teacher professional development, and advance the argument that a situative perspective may elicit more meaningful, relevant, and productive teacher conversations and curricular designs.
I have been playing around with Pintrest since our class on Tuesday, and I have been using this focused approach to write small reflections on the writing I am doing. The phrasing of these reflections are finding their way into the literature review section of my early inquiry project, and because my articles are organized in Zotero, I can match up my musings and the claims within them to evidence-based arguments, giving more substance to my overall argument.
As a final comment, I'll note that some of the things I don't particularly like about Boote and Beile's rubric are (a) the inconsistencies in the ratings (see Methodology and the accompanying footnote that does not, in my opinion, sufficiently explain why the other categories are not rated on a four point scale), and (b) the weight implied in the ordering of the requirements. This last point is particularly bothersome, as even the phrasing of the different rating requirements indicate that Coverage, for example, holds more weight than Rhetoric. I'm not sure I agree with their ordering, and feel it might become problematic if a student-researcher were to follow this rubric to the T. However, I should qualify this paragraph with the note that I often find rubrics too constraining in that they encourage the learner to focus on small aspects asking "Is this what you want?" rather than focusing on the task of analysis and argument in the big picture. They are also very difficult to write, and language like "Well developed, coherent" or "Critiqued research methods" is subjective and vague, and encourages learners to interpret language and then be upset when they don't get all of their points. I know that this rubric is not meant to be used to actually "grade" a literature review, but it presents the information as if it could be (which can be problematic) and encourages people to do so (which can be even more problematic). A better and more productive focus for a reviewer would be to assess whether the researcher has sufficiently discussed and synthesized the relevant literature necessary to identify a gap, support claims, and advance an argument.
I appreciate your critiques of Boote and Beile's rubric. They certainly designed this for a particular type of literature review, perhaps much like what is published in the Review of Educational Research. I find the dialogue between Boote and Beile and Maxwell really interesting, as they actually have a great deal of consensus across their ideas. For instance, Maxwell's methods texts discuss at length the lit review process, much like Boote and Beile. Boote and Beile, in their response to Maxwell, highlight similar ideas to Maxwell. Yet, as you noted, there is a fundamental difference in relation to the purpose of a lit review in relation to the dissertation process. Every time I re-read this discussion, I always come back to the idea that regardless of the position, there is a shared understanding that the literature review process is central to becoming part of a field(s) and is ongoing.
ReplyDelete