"Can collaborative learning in the classroom verses individual learning help raise a students individual grade?"

Review of Related Literature

At this point you should make an initial foray into the professional literature, the formal record of other people’s experiences, to try to better understand the problem on which you are focusing. The literature may suggest other ways of looking at your problem and help you to identify potential promising practices that you might use in your classroom to correct the problem. To borrow the words of Kemmis ( 1988 ), “Can existing research throw any light on your situation and help you see it more clearly?” (p. 55).

Reviewing the literature is a valuable contribution to the action research process that could actually save you time. Often, teacher researchers think that they know what their problem is but become stymied in the process because they weren’t really sure what they were asking. Taking time to immerse yourself in the literature allows you to reflect on your own problems through someone else’s lens. You can locate yourself within the research literature and find support for what you are doing or be challenged by what other researchers have done and how they have tackled a particular problem.

At the end of the process, you ought to be informed enough about the literature that you could talk to colleagues about the major themes that emerged. Similarly, you should be able to talk about “promising practices” that were discussed.

Sometimes, teacher researchers will claim that they cannot find any published research related to their area of focus. This invariably leads to questions of relevance and importance. After all, if nobody else has researched the problem, perhaps it is not worthy of investigation! However, as the following personal and serious illustration demonstrates, lack of published research on a topic does not mean that the topic is not important. About 15 years ago my son, who was five years old at the time, inexplicably began to pass blood in his urine—a pretty scary sight for any parent. After many invasive medical tests over a six-month period, we finally opted for a procedure that required general anesthesia in order to determine the cause of the blood. The surgeon emerged from the operating room and pronounced, “I have some good news, and I have some bad news!” The good news was that the surgeon was able to diagnose the cause of the internal bleeding—a rare, benign, and non-life-threatening condition called trigonitis. The bad news was that the surgeon was unable to tell us why our son had developed the condition or how to treat it! I was shocked at this revelation from the surgeon, a pediatric urology specialist. How could my son be bleeding internally and there not be a medical explanation? The surgeon responded that, because the condition was rare, benign, and non-life-threatening, it simply did not warrant research! My point here is not to be melodramatic but rather to make a case for the importance of your own research, regardless of whether it has been researched (and published) by other professionals. Just because your area of focus is unique to you does not make it any less important. It is your problem and you own it. Do not be disheartened if your review of the literature fails to provide you with helpful insights.

Too often the review of related literature is seen as a necessary evil to be completed as fast as possible so that one can get on with the “real research.” This perspective reflects a lack of understanding of the purposes and importance of the review and a feeling of uneasiness on the part of students who are not sure how to report the literature. Nonetheless, the review of related literature is as important as any other component of the research process and can be conducted quite painlessly if approached in an orderly manner. Some researchers even find the process quite enjoyable!

The review of related literature involves the systematic identification, location, and analysis of documents containing information related to the research problem. The term is also used to describe the written component of a research plan or report that discusses the reviewed documents. These documents can include articles, abstracts, reviews, monographs, dissertations, books, other research reports, and electronic media effort. The major purpose of reviewing the literature is to determine what has already been done that relates to your topic. This knowledge not only prevents you from unintentionally duplicating another person’s research, but it also gives you the understanding and insight you need to place your topic within a logical framework. Previous studies can provide the rationale for your research hypothesis, and indications of what needs to be done can help you justify the significance of your study. Put simply, the review tells you what has been done and what needs to be done.

Another important purpose of reviewing the literature is to discover research strategies and specific data collection approaches that have or have not been productive in investigations of topics similar to yours. This information will help you avoid other researchers’ mistakes and profit from their experiences. It may suggest approaches and procedures that you previously had not considered. For example, suppose your topic involved the comparative effects of a brand-new experimental method versus the traditional method on the achievement of eighth-grade science students. The review of literature may reveal ten related studies that found no differences in achievement. Several of the studies, however, may suggest that the brand-new method is more effective for certain kinds of students than for others. Thus, you may reformulate your topic to involve the comparative effectiveness of the brand-new method versus the traditional method on the achievement of a subgroup of eighth-grade science students—those with low aptitude.

Being familiar with previous research also facilitates interpretation of your study results. The results can be discussed in terms of whether and how they agree with previous findings. If the results contradict previous findings, you can describe differences between your study and the others, providing a rationale for the discrepancy. If your results are consistent with other findings, your report should include suggestions for the next step; if they are not consistent, your report should include suggestions for studies that may resolve the conflict.

Beginning researchers often have difficulty determining how broad and comprehensive their literature reviews should be. At times, all the literature will seem directly related to the topic, so it may be difficult to decide when to stop. Determining whether an article is truly relevant to the topic is complicated and requires time. Unfortunately, there is no simple formula to solve the problem. You must decide using your own judgment and the advice of your teachers or advisors.

The following general guidelines can assist you:

· • Avoid the temptation to include everything you find in your literature review. Bigger does not mean better. A smaller, well-organized review is definitely

· preferred to a review containing many studies that are only tangentially related to the problem.

· • When investigating a heavily researched area, review only those works that are directly related to your specific problem. You will find plenty of references and should not have to rely on less relevant studies. For example, the role of feedback for verbal and nonverbal learning has been extensively studied in both non-human animals and human beings for a variety of different learning tasks. Focus on those using similar subjects or similar variables—for example, if you were concerned with the relation between frequency of feedback and chemistry achievement, you would probably not have to review feedback studies related to non-human animal learning.

· • When investigating a new or little-researched problem area, review any study related in some meaningful way to your problem. Gather enough information to develop a logical framework for the study and a sound rationale for the research hypothesis. For example, suppose you wanted to study the effects of an exam for non–English speaking students on GPA. The students must pass the exam to graduate. Your literature review would probably include any studies that involved English as a second language (ESL) classes and the effects of culture-specific grading practices as well as studies that identified strategies to improve the learning of ESL students. In a few years, there will probably be enough research on the academic consequences of such an exam on non-English speaking students to permit a much more narrowly focused literature review.

A common misconception among beginning researchers is that the worth of a topic is directly related to the amount of literature available about it. This is not the case. For many new and important areas of research, few studies have been published. The effects of high-stakes testing is one such area. The very lack of such research often increases the worth of its study. On the other hand, the fact that a thousand studies have already been done in a given problem area does not mean there is no further need for research in that area. Such an area will generally be very well developed, and subtopics that need additional research will be readily identifiable.

Action Research and the Review of Related Literature

Action researchers disagree about the role of the literature review in the research process. Some researchers have argued that reviewing the literature curtails inductive analysis—using induction to determine the direction of the research—and should be avoided at the early stages of the research process (Bogdan & Biklen,  1998 ). Others suggest that the review of related literature is important early in the action research process because it serves the following functions:

· • The literature review demonstrates the underlying assumptions (i.e., propositions) behind the research questions that are central to the research proposal.

· • The literature review provides a way for the novice researcher to convince the proposal reviewers that he or she is knowledgeable about the related research and the intellectual traditions that support the proposed study (Marshall & Rossman,  1995 ).

· • The literature review provides the researcher with an opportunity to identify any gaps that may exist in the body of literature and to provide a rationale for how the proposed study may contribute to the existing body of knowledge.

· • The literature review helps the researcher to refine the research questions and embed them in guiding hypotheses that provide possible directions the researcher may follow.

TABLE 3–1 Conducting a Literature Review

· 1. Identify and make a list of keywords to guide your literature search. · 2. Using your keywords, locate primary and secondary sources that pertain to your research topic. · 3. Evaluate your sources for quality. · 4. Abstract your sources. · 5. Analyze and organize your sources using a literature matrix. · 6. Write the literature review.

Source: From Educational Research: Competencies for Analysis and Application (10th ed.), by L. R. Gay, G. E. Mills, and P. Airasian, © 2012. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Conducting a literature review follows a basic set of steps.  Table 3–1  outlines the basic process you take when reviewing the literature.