Mind the gap. From our early days in school, we’re told of the importance of conducting literature reviews as a means of finding “the gap” in the literature that will guide our work. However, most of us ignored this advice and launched into our early projects doing things backward. Instead of starting with a literature review as a means of picking an area of focus, we got caught up with an “interesting” topic or something that bugged us at school or work, and we latched on to some vague notion of we wanted to explore.
However, when you know little about a topic, it’s hard to set parameters around the scope of your exploration. This is usually the early point in a project when we’d freak out about where to start. Since we hadn’t started with a literature review, we didn’t know what we didn’t know, which made it difficult to know how to start digging. We had a vague idea of the words used around the topic, but the language used to describe things in education are often variously defined and used interchangeably (e.g., interaction and engagement).
When we did backtrack and finally started doing something that resembled a literature review, it was often because it was a requirement of the paper. As we started searching some keywords to see what we could out find about the topic, we were often surprised. Lo and behold! People were here before us! Often, lots of people … and from different fields. Oh, look! These people ran into the same issues and questions I’m raising. They faced the same struggles with a mish-mash of definitions for the same words, so they took the time to define the terms. Whoa! Look at that. In the discussion and conclusion of their papers (sometimes even in the ABSTRACTS) they told us what still needs to be studied related to this topic. Mind. Blown.
Maybe it’s part of our growth, but nearly all students have done exactly what I described. Truth be told, I still catch myself going down this path at times. I recall sitting in a dissertation proposal seminar when I’d already narrowed down my topic after numerous iterations of a literature review that I’d used to support several different papers. Some other students were still at the stage I described above. They were starting with a topic they wanted to research and were looking for literature to “support” their need to do their desired study. Until you see this happening to another student, it’s hard to appreciate how backward that approach is.
However, minding the gap is more than just an efficient and effective means to frame your next study, it also grounds your work within a base of knowledge. I can’t think of a time when I heard of a topic in education that NEVER had another soul consider it, write about it, or conduct a study about it. In my experience, a quick search of Google Scholar always unearths at least some breadcrumbs leading you to those who have come before you. Later this week, I’ll spend some time sharing a “5-minute” literature review approach I take when reviewing papers for journal submissions or helping students with papers.