Syntheses of Higher Education Research

What We Know

Malcolm Tight

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350128750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

As higher education has massified there has been a greater need for higher education research: to better understand and improve practice and provision. The expansion of higher education research has in turn led to systematic reviews and meta-analyses being carried out of areas of the field, so as to synthesise or summarise the qualitative and quantitative findings of this research. These systematic reviews and meta-analyses give an account of where we are now in higher education research. Malcolm Tight takes a global perspective, looking beyond Anglophone originating English Language publishing, particularly Africa, East and South Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, bringing together their findings to provide an accessible and practical overview. Bringing together over 96 systematic reviews and 62 meta-analyses focusing on particular topics in higher education research, Tight explores key topics: teaching and learning, course design, the student experience, quality, system policy, institutional management, academic work, and knowledge and research.

Part one

Overview

The first part of this book contains three chapters.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to what the book is about and what it contains: the identification and examination of syntheses of higher education research. Taken together, these provide a highly useful guide to what we know, and conversely what we don’t know, about higher education.

Chapter 2 examines the nature of research syntheses: systematic reviews, meta-analyses and substantive literature reviews. It discusses what they are, what they do and how they are applied in practice.

Chapter 3 identifies, and provides an overview of, the syntheses that have been carried out of higher education research to date. These are then examined in more detail in the thirteen chapters in part two of the book.

Together, these three chapters provide an overview of, and introduction to, the book as a whole.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book identifies, discusses and interrogates the many syntheses of higher education research that have been carried out to date, and published in the English language, across the globe.

Research syntheses take a number of forms. Historically, the most common has been the literature review, normally undertaken as part of a larger study to set out – usually selectively – the relevant research that has been done on the topic in question. Literature reviews may also be undertaken as stand-alone exercises, however, when they may be more thorough and comprehensive in their approach to the literature. At some point literature reviews shade into what are now more commonly known as systematic reviews.

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are – qualitative and quantitative respectively – means of synthesizing the research studies that have been carried out on a particular topic (e.g. learning approaches, peer assessment, the research/teaching nexus). They comprise the bulk of research syntheses and aim to identify, assess and summarize all of the research that has been carried out and published on a particular topic.

As well as comprehensive literature reviews, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, there are some other studies which may qualify as research syntheses. The most obvious are in the form of what are essentially textbooks, focusing on a particular topic or field and embodying substantive and critical reviews of the relevant academic literature. There are a number of these that focus on higher education research.

Most research studies – of higher education as well as other areas – are relatively small scale, and their findings can vary, but, as the evidence builds up, research syntheses enable a summary or overview to be made to see what general lessons can be learnt. By drawing the lessons from all of these exercises together in one place, this book provides an invaluable source of information on what we know about higher education and how it works. By implication, it also indicates what we don’t know and where, in particular, further research might most fruitfully be directed.

The third wave

The recent growth in the numbers of systematic reviews and meta-analyses of higher education research (see Chapter 3) may be seen as a ‘third wave’ in the development of higher education and higher education research.

The first wave was the expansion of higher education itself, transforming – in a relatively short time period, a matter of a few decades – from a system that served only an elite portion of the population to one offering mass participation and, beyond that, to providing higher educational opportunities for everyone in society who wished to make use of them (and, increasingly, to use them on more than one occasion). This latter position is now the norm, or at least the aspiration, in all developed and many developing countries around the world.

The second wave – somewhat lagging behind the development of higher education itself – was the growth of higher education research. As higher education expanded, interest in researching it naturally grew. In part, this was driven by personal interest; those working within the higher education sector noticed changes that were underway, had their own ideas about them and conducted some small-scale research to provide evidence. But there was also a drive from above; those funding higher education became more concerned that their money was being well spent, while those running higher education institutions wanted to ensure they were doing so effectively, and to compare their performance and practice with other institutions (i.e. through benchmarking).

The third wave – again with a time lag built in – came as the volume of higher education research built up. As more and more research studies were completed on a growing range of topics – albeit most of them small scale and local in nature – the need to compare their findings grew. How well did a particular innovation in the design or delivery of the curriculum work in different countries, institutions and disciplines?

Hence the contemporary interest in systematic reviews, meta-analyses and other syntheses of higher education research. These syntheses seek to identify all of the relevant published studies on a given theme or at least all of those in a particular language and/or published in a given time period. They then summarize or synthesize their findings to try and reach more general conclusions.

The fourth wave, by implication, will involve improvements in both higher education and higher education research, as the lessons from research in the form of systematic reviews and meta-analyses are taken on board. In the future, therefore, in what we might term the fifth wave, higher education research will most likely be much more targeted – on what we don’t know or don’t know enough about – while still maintaining some space for purely interest-driven research.

What this book contains

This book contains seventeen chapters, organized into three parts, and an extensive list of references. Following this introductory chapter, the first substantive chapter (Chapter 2) discusses the nature of systematic reviews, meta-analyses and other forms of research syntheses, their history, the different kinds of data sources that they use, how they are carried out, and their strengths and weaknesses. Existing syntheses of higher education research published in the English language – which form the basis for the analysis in the remainder of the book – are then identified and discussed in Chapter 3.

The main part of the book, part two, consists of thirteen chapters – Chapters 4 to 16 – which examine in detail the syntheses that have been carried out in different areas of higher education research. Eight areas or themes are used to organize the discussion: teaching and learning, course design, the student experience, quality, system policy, institutional management, academic work, knowledge and research.

These areas or themes are, of course, to some extent arbitrary, but they provide a system for analysing higher education research that I have developed and applied over the last twenty years and which has been taken up and used by other researchers worldwide. There are also, and again of course, inevitably overlaps between the areas or themes, but these will be dealt with in the book through the use of cross-referencing.

As will become apparent as you look and read through the book, the volume of research, and hence the numbers of systematic reviews, meta-analyses and other research syntheses that have been carried out and published, varies between areas and themes. Course design, in particular, has been a very popular topic for research and then research synthesis.

To make the text more manageable, therefore, the syntheses that have been carried out into research into course design are discussed in six themed chapters (Chapters 5 to 10). These focus on, successively, types of instruction; types of learning; distance, online and e-learning; curriculum; assessment; and outcomes. This explains, of course, why the eight areas or themes require thirteen chapters to discuss.

One other key point is that, in practice, as discussed in Chapter 2, the terminology of research syntheses has been applied in varied ways, both historically and contemporarily. Most significantly, as has already been pointed out, systematic reviews are on the same spectrum as, and hence overlap with, literature reviews.

Indeed, some literature reviews – which I shall call substantive literature reviews – are as comprehensive as systematic reviews, even though their authors do not identify them as such (the term ‘systematic review’ has only recently gained general acceptance). A number of these have, therefore, been included in the analyses, because to exclude them would have been wasteful.

A final chapter (Chapter 17), in part three, offers some general conclusions from the analyses, as much in terms of what they do not cover as what they do, and looks forward to what the future may bring.

How the book was compiled

This book forms part of a continuing project which I have been conducting over the last two decades, aiming to chart the changing state of higher education research worldwide. The project has to date resulted in the publication of three major books (Tight 2003, 2012a, 2019a) and a series of journal articles and book chapters (Tight 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2011a, 2012b, 2012c, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2014d, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2015d, 2015e, 2016a, 2016b, 2018a, 2018b, 2019b, 2020, forthcoming a).

The methodology used in this research – though I was not initially aware that it had this label – has been chiefly that of systematic review, though it also involves elements of meta-analysis. In the current book this methodology is applied to systematic reviews and meta-analyses. In other words, in this book I am conducting a systematic review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses of higher education research to try to produce a comprehensive, overall picture.

Search engines – principally Scopus, Google Scholar and World of Science – and keywords – ‘higher education’, ‘university’, ‘college’, ‘systematic review’, ‘meta-analysis’, ‘literature review’ and a range of words reflecting the different themes or areas of research identified – have been employed to identify relevant published work in the English language. Different search engines were used because none of them are wholly comprehensive, and each has a particular coverage and historical reach. The items identified through the searches were then accessed, read and – where relevant – incorporated in the analysis. The references included in each item were also checked for further research syntheses that had not been identified through the search engines.

While the book takes an explicitly international focus, it has to be acknowledged that confining attention to English language publications does impose some limitations. A great deal of higher education research – and resultant systematic reviews and meta-analysis – is published in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and other languages. While it is increasingly true that the best researchers seek to publish their work in English – as the current academic lingua franca – some syntheses will undoubtedly have been missed because of this language limitation.

It is also the case, of course, that, despite assiduous and repeated searches, some relevant English language systematic reviews and meta-analyses will have been missed. This might be due to their age or relatively obscure publication but is more likely a consequence of the increasing volume of academic publication, year by year, across the board. More and more systematic reviews and meta-analyses are being carried out and published with each succeeding year.

In a few cases I was unable to obtain a copy of a published systematic review or meta-analysis. In some other cases, while I was able to obtain copies, I decided that the systematic review or meta-analysis was not of the requisite quality for inclusion in this book (e.g. their coverage was poor, their scope was too narrow or their approach was unclear).

The focus has been on published systematic reviews, meta-analyses and other research syntheses, as this should ensure some level of quality assurance through the review process normally required for publication. The vast majority of the research syntheses identified and referred to are, therefore, in the form of refereed journal articles. Reports produced for reputable academic, governmental or other organizations have also been included, as have a few books and edited book chapters.

Unpublished syntheses, chiefly student theses and dissertations, and unpublished conference papers have largely been excluded. Many of these, where they are of the requisite quality, later appear as publications.

I would be grateful to hear of any important systematic reviews, substantive literature reviews or meta-analyses of higher education research that I have missed, particularly the older and more obscure. I will then endeavour to incorporate these, along with new systematic reviews and meta-analyses as they appear, in subsequent editions of this book.

How to use this book

A book of this nature lends itself to being used in a variety of ways. It is unlikely, however, that many readers will choose to read it literally from cover to cover.

Fellow higher education researchers, whether new to the field or more experienced, should be able to readily focus on particular topics of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Part One: Overview
• Part Two: Analyses
• Part Three: Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Imprint