Rubric for Lit Reviews

Taking time today to read the required article from Boote & Beile (2005) only to find a gem of information to guide the work I need to do in conducting research and creating a literature review for my PhD dissertation. While the authors express concerns with the current ‘state of the nation’ in educationally focused research writing and completed dissertations, these are not the items that gained my attention. It was the recommended skills and criteria that are essential to a quality literature review. The authors base their twelve item scoring guide on previous work done by Hart (1999). They applied this framework to a review of dissertation documents to determine efficacy of each of the criterion selected and explained. These include 5 categories and 12 criterion.

1. Coverage
   • justification criteria are shared to elaborate on inclusion and exclusion of research – explicitly shows how decisions are made about suitability, quality of research that is used or rejected from the lit review
   • Bruce (2001a) suggests coverage includes 8 criteria – “topicality, comprehensiveness, breadth, exclusion, relevance, currency, availability, and authority”. (p. 7)
2. Synthesis – designed to examine how well the author summarized, analyzed and synthesized
   • distinguish what has been done in the area of interest and what has not been done
   • situate the topic within a broader scholarly context using the literature
   • locate the topic within historical context
   • model use and understanding of vocabulary in the topic and field
   • identify critical variables and phenomena relating to the topic
   • synthesized and shared new perspectives on the literature (items found on p. 7)
3. Methodology
   • identifies key methodologies and research techniques in the field, examining their advantages and disadvantages
   • relates concepts and theoretical stances to the specific methodologies examined
4. Significance
   • rationalization for practical significance of the research problem, methodologies
   • rationalization for scholarly significance of the research problem, methodologies
5. Rhetoric
   • coherence, structure, organization, written arguments (p. 9)

Boote & Beile suggest that including this practice of explicit instruction across the education research sector, with each course instructor providing and sharing the skills and techniques they have acquired and feel are important, can change the culture in educational research, to enhance the primacy of the literature review as a critical component of a “sophisticated understanding of a field of study” (p. 9).

SO, what does this mean for me. Of primary concern is the strategy for documenting my research actions – when I’m looking for articles, why I select specific articles, strategies and search parameters I’m using, and judgements I’m making about articles I locate, store, read, add to reference listings, and identifying the ones where I write a four sentence summary. Keeping accurate ‘bins’ for my reading and research, using key words, tags, and categories will help my overall literature review process in the end – I may not see it right now, but articles I’m reading and referencing for the upcoming courses will help shape the literature review for the comprehensive portfolio submission.

The second thought and connection comes from the word ‘generativity’ used in this journal article, which references the “ability to build on scholarship and research of those who have come before us” thus “granting our work integrity and sophistication” (Boote & Beile, 2005, p. 3). This is a concept for me to work toward – generativity!

Reference:

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