Role of Education in Reducing Flash Flood Effects

Abstract

A thorough, sophisticated literature review is the foundation and in-spiration for substantial, useful research. The complex nature of edu-cation research demands such thorough, sophisticated reviews. Although doctoral education is a key means for improving education research, the literature has given short shrift to the dissertation liter-ature review. This article suggests criteria to evaluate the quality of dissertation literature reviews and reports a study that examined dis-sertations at three universities. Acquiring the skills and knowledge required to be education scholars, able to analyze and synthesize the research in a field of specialization, should be the focal, integrative activity of predissertation doctoral education. Such scholarship is a prerequisite for increased methodological sophistication and for im-proving the usefulness of education research. e have all heard the joke before-as we move through graduate school, we learn more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing. It is expected that someone earning a doctorate has a thorough and sophisticated understanding of an area of research and scholarship. Unfortunately, many doctoral dissertations in education belie the joke, their authors failing to master the liter-ature that is supposed to be the foundation of their research. If their dissertation literature reviews are any indication, many of these now-doctors know bits and pieces of a disorganized topic. Yet we cannot blame them for their failure to demonstrate what we, the education research community, have not clearly articu-lated or valued. Acquiring the skills and knowledge required to be education scholars should be the focal, integrative activity of predissertation doctoral education. Preparing students to analyze and synthesize research in a field of specialization is crucial to understanding ed-ucational ideas. Such preparation is prerequisite to choosing a productive dissertation topic and appropriating fruitful methods of data collection and analysis. In this article, we first argue that a thorough, sophisticated re-view of literature is even more important in education research, with its messy, complex problems, than in most other fields and disciplines. We then argue that current initiatives and faculty fo-cuses have ignored the centrality of the literature review in re-search preparation, in turn weakening the quality of education research. This oversight has its roots, we believe, in a too-narrow conception of the literature review-as merely an exhaustive summary of prior research-and a misunderstanding of its role in research. By building on the extant literature that supports the centrality of the literature review, we offer a practical framework from which to analyze the quality of doctoral dissertation reviews of the literature. We end by further developing our understand-ing of the literature review and indicating some means of im-proving the situation. A substantive, thorough, sophisticated literature review is a pre-condition for doing substantive, thorough, sophisticated research. "Good" research is good because it advances our collective under-standing. To advance our collective understanding, a researcher or scholar needs to understand what has been done before, the strengths and weaknesses of existing studies, and what they might mean. A researcher cannot perform significant research without first understanding the literature in the field. Not under-standing the prior research clearly puts a researcher at a disadvan-tage. Shulman argues that generativity-along with discipline, publication, and peer review-is one of the hallmarks of schol-arship (1999, p. 162-163). He defines generativity as the ability to build on the scholarship and research of those who have come before us. Generativity grants our work integrity and sophistica-tion. To be useful and meaningful, education research must be cumulative; it must build on and learn from prior research and scholarship on the topic. Yet the messy, complicated nature of problems in education makes generativity in education research more difficult than in most other fields and disciplines (Berliner, 2002) and demands that we develop more sophisticated literature reviews. In tradi-tional disciplinary research, where a researcher is communicating with a well-defined audience about commonly accepted problems and where disciplinary research often is based on a canon of shared knowledge, the researcher's literature review is somewhat easier to construct. However, in education research we are often faced with the challenge of communicating with a diverse audi-ence, and it is very difficult for us to assume shared knowledge, Educational Researcher, Vol. 34, No. 6, pp. 3-15