Systematic literature reviews and ‘trusting the process’

“Oh, a systematic literature review is probably just another name for a normal literature review. I’ve done those before. That’ll be easy!”

How wrong I was.

On an EdD (a ‘professional doctorate’, i.e. designed for practitioners), there is a taught stage before moving onto the thesis. On my course, there are two taught doctoral-level modules. The first of these requires us to write a systematic literature review. I knew this would be slightly more challenging than the literature reviews I’ve written before, but I don’t think I quite realised the extent of it. I just thought I’d have to be a bit more careful in my search.

There is a long and relatively drawn-out process involved in writing this kind of piece:

• Systematically searching through core journals in the area I’m looking at (having identified core journals through lots of ‘random’ reading)
• Carefully selecting terminology to search databases with
  • This involved multiple preliminary searches, getting used to the databases, working out the shortcuts each one uses, and finding a whole range of synonyms for terms to ensure I get all the results
• Whittling down the search results based on their relevance, initially by their title, then by their abstract, and then by reading full papers
• Recording (in excruciating detail) why each paper was included or excluded
• Writing up the rationale, search methods
• Extracting all relevant data from the included papers & assessing their quality (to aid justifying inclusion)
• Thematic analysis of the finally included papers
• Writing up the rest of the review

Before I continue, I am aware that the end of the bullet point list looks a bit like the “Draw the rest of the ****ing owl” subreddit on Reddit. This is because writing up the rest is actually not too difficult once the analysis is done. I think. Maybe. We’ll see.

My review is focusing on whether students at Key Stage 4 (age 14-16) find the use of target grades motivational. It’s true that there is a huge range of literature on student motivation, however there is a paucity of any literature covering the concept of target grades. It seems to me that they were brought in when league tables came to be, but there doesn’t seem to be much literature about it. If you know of some, please let me know.

This process has been gruelling, but it’s actually been really useful. It means that in the future I’ll be able to more effectively identify the relevant literature for my topic, rather than finding a few relevant papers, and then just going back to their references. It also means that I’ve had to do loads of additional work around the topic, including learning about several different theories developed in the last century that various different academics subscribe to (and I’ve found out which academics are key in this area).

When the course leader said back in October to “trust the process” I don’t think I really got why she said it. Now it’s very much clear that this module is genuinely about the process of systematically searching for literature (a key skill), developing my thinking, and helping me to further refine what I’ll eventually do for my thesis.

If I don’t fail, maybe I’ll post the review here. We’ll see.
I don’t anticipate failing, but cautious optimism can’t hurt, right?