introduction

Doing a literature review

Introducing Michael Hammond

I am senior lecturer at the Institute of Education, University of Warwick where I co-ordinate the ICT PGCE course, lead the MA in Educational Studies and work in the Centre for New Technologies Research in Education (Centre).

I have worked in several schools in England and abroad and at the University of Sheffield and now at Warwick.

Outside of work I like travelling (in the past I have lived in Central America and Italy), cinema, football - well most sports - and doing everyday things with my children.

I have written various papers and chapters about ICT and teaching and much of my recent work has been looking at professional development.

Some questions for discussion:

Can anyone recommend a useful literature review?

What experiences have you had in carrying out literature reviews?

A web search reveals various definitions of a literature review, Try this from Mount Saint Vincent University

A comprehensive survey of publications in a specific field of study or related to a particular line of research, usually in the form of a list of references or an in-depth review of key works. The first section of most research articles is usually devoted to a review of the previously published literature on the topic addressed in the article.

Why do a literature review?

A straight forward answer is that it enables you to build on what others have done specifically to:

find out what is already known about a topic

avoid asking questions to which we already know the answer

see how others have researched the topic

identify questions that have not been addressed

highlights consistency and diversity within past work

How do you carry out a literature review?

A suggested route is to:	What difficulties might arise?
Identify your topic	How rigid do you want to be? eg if you are interested in ICT and group work are you going to look at group work in depth even studies which do not mention ICT.
Set criteria for your review	Are you going to look at practitioner accounts or academic literature or both? You cannot look at everything, How are you going to prioritise?
Access the literature	What does the library have? Can you get to the library? What access do you have to online resources?
Draw up a consistent approach to note taking	You may start with a fixed idea of the themes you are interested in (for example opportunities and constraints associated with ICT) but do you need to start to add new ones (eg the role of the teacher, specific comments on software etc) as you go on?
Make notes on studies	Are you organised and consistent in your note keeping? Few of us are!
Aggregate your finding	Again are your notes clear enough to enable you to do this?
Analyse your findings	Here you need to look at consistency and contrasts within the findings, however the findings will rarely fall into place.
Report your findings	Who is your audience? Teachers might be interested in main findings but academics will be interested in research methods as well.
What other routes are suggested?

A literature review always sounds good in principle, a thorough almost scientific view of what has been said already but you quickly realise you are exercising judgements about the works you are reading and how you report them.

Examples of literature reviews

Examples of academic reviews and are available here.

NESTA have commissioned a series of more discursive type of reviews which are available here