“How did your systematic review go?” Well…

I didn’t fail! So that’s good.

For the uninitiated, I spent my Easter break from school (about six weeks ago now) writing a systematic literature review about the use of target grades in schools as a method of motivation for secondary-age pupils. It became clear early on (but perhaps not early enough) that this links really closely with achievement goal theory, which I wrote about in another previous post. In this post, I’m going to briefly look at some of the things that went well in my review, and some things that didn’t, that I’ll need to work on in the future.

Who doesn’t love a WWW and EBI, hey?

What went well

1. My writing in general received solid ‘Satisfactory’ grades, which is reassuring. The arguments were laid out coherently and supported with evidence
2. The detail I included (in the appendix) was helpful for showing why result papers were excluded (though more detail was needed)

Even better if…

There were quite a few of these that’ll help me improve my writing (both for pieces like this, but also generally).

1. I need to more clearly problematise the use of target grades – what’s the issue I’m actually (eventually) looking to solve here? How do they actually link to AGT?
2. The dates I used for the review could’ve been more carefully thought out. I didn’t want to use too much old literature, but really if the thing I’m looking at started in the late 90s-early noughties, then that’s when I needed to start my date range from.
3. I needed to make my search strategy a bit clearer – why did I exclude the things that I did? There was a bit of this in the appendix but firstly, it needs to be in the main body, and more detail would’ve been useful.
4. Finally, I need to be clearer with how I analysed the papers I included in the review.

How I’m thinking about addressing the EBIs

I’ve been thinking pretty hard about number 1. It was also something I talked a bit about in my first supervision, but I’m going to write another post about this to help clarify my thinking. If I can write about it here, it’ll help with the more formal writing. Not that this is the same, at all…! Number 2 is pretty easy to sort, I just start any future searches with a more sensible date range.

For numbers 3 and 4, some more detailed note-taking during the entire process would’ve been helpful. I did keep some notes (and that’s what helped me get the detail I did include), but they need to be more detailed. Better to learn this lesson now rather than in three years time…