London Review of Education

Systematic reviews in education: producing and acquiring knowledge in times of crisis and social change

There was significant demand for rigorous evidence during the Covid-19 pandemic. In response, the education sector moved quickly to commission systematic reviews to support choices that had to be taken. Policymakers’ concerns about the effects of lockdown restrictions during the crisis, for example, led to reviews on the potential impact of school closures on learning outcomes.

The pandemic re-emphasised the importance of methodologically rigorous evidence synthesis to inform decision-making and further illustrated the problem that producing systematic reviews is often resource intensive and time-consuming, with reviews often falling quickly out of date. In the current era of data abundance and advances in research complexity, the challenges of completing well-conducted reviews to (often short) timetables are growing.

The articles in this special feature bring together different types of evidence syntheses dealing with the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on the educational system, as well as papers engaging with methodological developments in systematic reviews, such as bibliometrics and machine learning.

Articles are published open access and can be read freely online by anyone; please see the article list below.

Publication date: from 2nd October 2024

Editors

Dr Janice Tripney, Associate Professor of Social Policy, Social Research Institute, IOE - Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK
Dr Sabine Wollscheid, Research Professor, The Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU), Norway