Happy Hour Week 5

HAPPY HOUR, WEEK 5
Review of the Literature


A thorough, sophisticated literature review is the foundation and inspiration for
substantial, useful research.
Boote & Beile, 2005


HAPPY HOUR DISCUSSION:
1. Take a few moments to discuss and record in your blog how you conducted your literature review last semester. What terms did you use to perform your search? How did you locate refereed literature? What criteria did you use to determine what articles to include? What criteria did you use to determine what articles to omit? How did you organize your review? How did you write it up? What skills did you need?

2. Labaree (2003) notes that doctoral students who write literature reviews often face difficulties because their identities clash between daily school life and university culture. His ideas include having to shift from:
· a normative to an analytic way of thinking
· a personal to an intellectual relationship with educational phenomena
· a particular to a universal perspective
· an experimental to a theoretical disposition

In your Blog explain: Explain how these ideas resonate with you. How might they influence, or even hamper, your ability to conduct a good literature review? How does literature relate to your study or your work in general? What areas of literature will inform your study? (make a list of topics, authors, key words, etc)

3. Extension: As you read articles for your own literature review consider if the literature cited was relevant, peer reviewed, timely, meaningful, appropriately connected to the study.

References

Boote, D.N.,& Beile, P. (2005). Scholars before researchers: On the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research preparation. Educational Researcher, 34(6), 3-15.

Last semester I felt like I found more articles directly related to my research. I had a technology component and it was a much narrower focus. I depended on ERIC a great deal and Google Scholar. I realize now however that I probably worked a bit too hard to find references and the like because I was not really using the library tools very efficiently. I tried to stick to academic journals and I avoided news type sources. I realize peer reviewed is ideal, but I'm not always sure how to determine if a journal meets that criteria or not.

When I read the Labree (2003) article I could relate to many of the ideas he was expressing and I could totally understand how that would impact particularly a classroom teacher. I say that because their scope of focus is extremely narrow and focused on their class. I feel like in my position I am often looking more at the global view as I have to worry about state issues as well as precendence within the entire district. The same challenge applies however in that I am still embedded into the day to day work. That rarely involves studying theory behind a decision or the writing of a lit review from a theoretical perspective. Typically the focus is on the practice and the experiential design.

Based on that, now that I find myself back in school looking at my environment from an academic perspective, the literature review can prove to be somewhat challenging. I think the bulk of the issue is that I don't always have the clarity or background knowledge of the theory to know where to begin to search. I also try and focus too much on one area as opposed to recognizing that my research may involve mulitple areas. In that case each may have to be studied individually and tied together as it fits my particular project.