There once was a PhD student – let’s call her Phyllis- working hard to land her research career. For that, she had to write a dissertation containing at least four studies. Her evil brain wanted her to not only conduct empirical studies, but also do a systematic literature review. At first, Phillis tried to find reasons for not doing it, because she dreaded that whole process. However, after a while she saw the greatness of the idea and took off to face the adventure. This adventure would not be a real adventure, had she not gotten into trouble several times. Read more
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Doing a systematic review 2
One of my papers is going to be a systematic review, so for the past few weeks I have been busy searching and selecting articles. Of course I encountered some problems, because it would not be a PhD if everything went right the first time! Saskia thought it might be interesting if I share some of my experiences with you guys.
Search terms
So I don’t know about you guys, but the subject of my research has many synonyms. While I usually refer to my topic as being “intermediate assessment” other researchers have talked about frequent testing, continuous testing, or I don’t know how many other combinations. The problem with topics that have a lot of synonyms is that you can miss some very relevant articles, just because, for example, you only searched for testing and not for exams.
To avoid this I re-read some articles I have used in my research before to see what terms they used. Another smart strategy to define your search terms is looking for other reviews about the same subject and see which search terms they use. Of course if you do find other reviews, make sure that yours is an interesting addition!
After going through some articles I read before and thinking of common synonyms myself I decided on a list of six words that could all signify assessment and seven terms that could indicate some form of intermediateness.
Searching
So you’ve decided on search terms, now it is time to search! There are so many different search engines and I do not pretend to know them all, but I have used the ones that are most common in the field of educational science, which are ERIC, PsycINFO and Web of Science. Your professor or librarian may know which are most suitable for your field.
Fun fact. When I asked Web of Science to search for a combination of my 13 search terms, it found almost FIVE.HUNDRED.THOUSAND. results. Even after refining by saying I only wanted articles related to education and educational research, there were still over 8800 relevant articles. As you can imagine this is too much to go through, so I decided to switch to search term pairs. This means I had to do several searches and for now I have only combined my seven adjectives with “assessment”. In the future I may expand my search into the other synonyms for assessment, but for now I’ve decided to go and see how many articles I can select from this.
Selecting
After running a search you are left with a long list of articles that you need to check for relevance. To make efficient use of your time this first check for selection is usually done based on the title and abstract of an article. Of course this is where you run into problems if titles and abstracts are not informative enough for you to make an informed decision. For these doubtful cases you may need to read the full article.
Furthermore, selecting is a human task, meaning that it is not totally objective. I supplied my daily supervisor with one list of search results and my criteria for selection to check my process. Whereas I selected 33 articles, he only selected 24 and of course he selected some articles that I didn’t and vice versa. So now we need to sit together and see why we chose such different articles.
If you’ve selected articles you need to download the full text for reading. Fortunately, I found 260 full text articles, out of 281 selected search results.
Reading
After selecting the articles you can start reading and extracting the relevant information for your review. This is what I am starting to do today, so I cannot provide any tips or experiences yet, but maybe you guys have some top tips for me? For example how I am going to survive reading 260 articles in the coming months!!
Ruimte voor excellentie? 0
Iedere professional heeft ruimte nodig om goed te kunnen functioneren, of niet?
Van sommige professionals wordt zelfs verwacht dat zij deze ruimte zelf creëren en benutten. De beginnende docenten in het Eerst-de-Klas traject en het OnderwijsTraineeship zijn hiervan een voorbeeld. De overheid heeft deze speciale leerwerktrajecten van de lerarenopleiding opgezet om excellente academici te enthousiasmeren voor het onderwijs. In het voortgezet onderwijs zouden deze academici een optimale ruimte dienen te creëren en benutten om hun baan uitdagend te houden voor zichzelf en een innovatieve wind te laten waaien in de school. Mooie woorden worden gebruikt in de omschrijving van deze programma’s. Zo is er bij het Eerst De Klas traineeship een leiderschapsprogramma ‘dat is vormgegeven door de meest toonaangevende organisaties in Nederland.’ Het OnderwijsTraineeship biedt naast de lerarenopleiding ‘masterclasses die je internsief laten kennis maken met de volledige breedte van het onderwijsveld’.
Toch lijkt er een belangrijk mechanisme over het hoofd te worden gezien. De docenten in beide trajecten starten namelijk als beginners in schoolorganisaties en hebben tijd nodig om de organisatie te leren kennen en de eigen positie binnen de ‘gevestigde orde’ te zien. Een begrip als enculturatie past goed bij deze fase. De balans tussen ruimte creëren, benutten en krijgen is daarmee een belangrijk onderdeel van deze initiatieven. Wij (Jacobiene Meirink & Anna van der Want) zijn heel benieuwd naar hoe de huidige docenten in het EDK en Onderwijstraineeship de balans tussen creëren, benutten en krijgen van ruimte ervaren! In een door ProBO gesubsidieerd project onderzoeken we deze thematiek.
Voor meer informatie zie www.professioneleruimte.info
Keep yourself going – 7 tips to keep writing when finishing you dissertation from Jorine Vermeulen 0
About 5 months ago Anna van der Want wrote
in a blogpost how she had planned NOT to finish her PhD, so she could continue doing the things she loved. If you decide in contradiction to finish your PhD, you might find some difficulties in pursuing that goal. Jorine Vermeulen (PhD student at Cito and University of Twente), you might remember her from the previous blogpost where she gave a conference-tip, is currently in that finishing-your-PhD-phase. She was kind enough, when I asked her how she kept on going in that phase, to provide some tips that I share, in her name, here:
ORD2015: Experiences from the Dutch Educational Research Days 2015 0
Usually we upload a new post every two weeks. However, last week the yearly ORD (Dutch Educational Research Days), a three-day conference, took place and we thought this conference deserved an extra post. Every PhD-student will go to at least one conference and you might therefore either recognize some situations depicted below, or use some of the experiences when preparing to go to a conference.
In this blogpost Tessa and I will give your our experiences from the ORD2015. Tessa, as a non-presenter who visited the ORD for the first time. Me, as a presenter of my first paper and who has visited the ORD now for the second time.
Me & My colleagues: a WAT-relationship 0
Sometimes, when two people in a relationship each have their own house, their own businesses and value their independence, they could have a LAT-relationship: Living Apart Together. Sometimes, when a bunch of colleagues each have their own offices, their own projects and value their own intellectual paths, they could have a WAT-relationship: Working Apart Together. A PhD can be considered quite an individual job. Read more
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