The literature review is a pivotal component in educational research studies, serving as a bridge between existing knowledge and the research being undertaken. This article examines the multifaceted role and function of the literature review from a pragmatic perspective, highlighting its significance in advancing knowledge and informing…

In the realm of education, there has been an increasing emphasis on developing analytical thinking (AT) in the past few years. This systematic review focuses on an analysis of journal publications that have explored AT within the context of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. This analysis investigated four primary…

The Cochrane Rapid Review Methods Group (RRMG) first released interim guidance in March 2020 to support authors in conducting rapid reviews (RRs). The objective of this mixed-methods study was to assess the adherence and investigate authors' understanding of the RRMG guidance. We identified all documents citing the Interim Cochrane RRMG guidance…

This research systematically examines the experimental articles on STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education). In this direction, experimental articles with the Social Sciences Citation Index on the Web of Science were analyzed within the scope of research questions, taking into account the guidelines of PRISMA.…

This review of recent scholarship (RRS) paper is a follow-up of the first, published in this journal in 2014. For this RRS paper, we identified and included 304 mixed-methods research (MMR) papers published in 20 top-tier applied linguistics (AL) journals. We used a six-pronged quality and transparency framework to review and analyze the MMR…

Children's fears have received scholarly attention for well over 50 years. A considerable amount of literature has focused on such fear variables as fear intensity and fear prevalence scores and age and gender differences. We used meta-analysis to systematically review the findings related to gender differences in children's fear intensity scores…

Identifying gifted students in today's complex context requires precision in both the definition of the concept and its constituent characteristics. However, there are discrepancies worldwide in the instruments established to diagnose gifted students. This study undertook a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify the most representative…

Scholarly efforts to identify core design features for effective teacher professional development have grown rapidly in the last 25 years. Many concise lists of design principles have emerged, most of which converge on a consensus of 5-7 presumably 'effective' features (e.g. collaborative tasks, active learning, focus on content). The…

Although the importance of listening to young children's voices is acknowledged in international literature, it is not clear whether educational researchers "really" listen to them and, if they do, what research designs and methods facilitate that. Therefore, using the EPPI-centre approach (2007), a systematic literature review was…

This study introduces a novel approach for conducting Systematic Literature Reviews(SLRs) by incorporating a unique mixed-methods design into the well-established SLR process. The proposed approach, identified as Mixed-Methods Based Systematic Literature Review (MMB-SLR), not only provides researchers with a broader perspective on their research…

As the number of articles on postsecondary topics expands, new methods are required to quantitatively understand the literature. Previous scholars looking at the higher education literature use manual coding, which limits the number of years that can be studied, or network analysis of citations and words, which does not yield groupings of articles…

In this article we propose a taxonomy describing various types of literature review or theoretical/conceptual articles. We distinguish each article type based on how well they address the "summary" and "advocacy" arguments inherent in all secondary scholarship. Understanding this taxonomy of review/theory scholarship is…

Meta-analytic reviews collect available empirical studies on a specified domain and calculate the average effect of a factor. Educators as well as researchers exploring a new domain of inquiry may rely on the conclusions from meta-analytic reviews rather than reading multiple primary studies. This article calls for caution in this regard because…

This research reviews 56 robots in science education (RSE) research articles published in SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) journals in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The analysis results showed that there were three clusters of RSE studies: robots in elementary science education, robot-based STEM activities, and robot-facilitated…

Growth in autism research necessitates corresponding attention to autism research ethics, including ethical and meaningful inclusion of diverse participants. This paper presents the results of a review of research ethics literature, strengthened by consultation with a task force involving autism professionals, family members, and self-advocates on…