5 A graphical guide to literature surveys
This method arose out of students' needs to undertake literature surveys, but importantly also, for them to understand them more as 'ideas surveys' or 'perspectives and research reviews' perhaps. The idea came into clearer focus when we set students tasks related literature and some handed in policy reviews with no critical or scholarly perspective; others, reviews of solely media comment or 'expert analysis'! Basically, in many cases, students were blithely ignoring a whole range of perspectives. Trying to get them to appreciate the importance of this fact, we reasoned that the simplest way (and in turns out, the most effective) was using a 4 quadrant diagram to illustrate the four perspectives that we were asking the students to consider in all their reviews.
We then set simple exercises to illustrate the importance of this: for example we chose issues (e.g. assessment policy at GCSE level) and asked students to do searches for the main emergent ideas from each perspective. This method could be used in many settings however, for a variety of reasons:
- Understanding the formation of policy
- Understanding the basis for professional standards
- Analysing the impact of research
- Evaluating research findings
- Media interpretation of research · Media coverage of complex subjects/ideas
- Looking at paradigm shifts in scholarship/research etc ……