The Evaluation of One-to-One Initiatives: Exploratory Results from a Systematic Review

Abstract

While one-to-one initiatives (that equip each student and teacher with digital devices) have been widely implemented, no systematic review has explored how they are being evaluated. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present exploratory insights from a systematic review on the evaluation of one-to-one initiatives. We focus on the relations inside the related research community and explore the relevant research topics that they have considered, through bibiliometric network analyses and topic modeling. Second, this paper contributes to existing guidelines about systematic reviews with an example that applies the mentioned analyses after the manual in-depth review of the papers (usually they are applied in parallel, or afterwards). Results depict a fragmented community, with little explicit collaborations among the research groups, but that shares a common body of literature providing good practices that can inform future one-to-one implementations. This community has considered a common set of topics (including, the implementation of educational technologies, mobile learning and classroom orchestration). Future evaluations of one-to-one initiatives would benefit if grounded in pedagogical theories and informed by learning analytics. Our approach enabled us to understand the dynamics of the related community, identify the core literature, and define guiding questions for future qualitative analyses.