Joel Mitchell and Katy Jordan
As mentioned in Chapter 1, EdTech Hub undertook a series of rapid evidence reviews (RERs) in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The RER format is a pragmatic compromise between the rigour of a systematic review and the speed of response demanded by a crisis situation. The EdTech Hub RER approach drew on the Cochrane Rapid Review guidance (Garritty et al., 2020) — adapting it to be more applicable to education research in the current context of needing to disseminate key lessons from existing evidence to inform policy and practice. In order to do this, the search criteria were focused and queried key databases relevant to education and technology. Strict screening criteria were applied to limit time wasted on marginally relevant literature. In order to equitably represent sources from a broader range of relevant research, the RERs also included intervention-related research and limited emphasis on aggregated findings, meta-analysis, and systematic reviews. This helped to ensure that the reviews included practical findings, with the intended audience being policymakers and individuals involved in educational decision-making across systems.
The research process therefore comprised a systematic sequence of scoping, searching, and screening. In the scoping phase, the research questions and eligibility criteria were defined and initial searches were conducted to help elicit relevant search terms for the search queries. A focused set of searches was then run within the relevant academic databases. The search results were then screened according to the inclusion criteria and the final set of studies were analysed thematically. While the RERs were completed concurrently by different teams, a consolidated approach to review and quality assurance ensured a consistent approach despite the different themes.
Scoping research
The methodological approach is informed by the Cochrane Collaboration Rapid Reviews Methods Group interim guidance on producing rapid reviews (Garritty et al., 2020). This guidance has subsequently been developed further and published by the group (Garritty et al., 2021). Systematic reviews are often regarded as sitting atop the hierarchy of standards of evidence (Cochrane Collaboration, 2019); Higgins and Green (2011) distinguish a systematic review thus:
“A systematic review is secondary research that seeks to collate all primary studies that fit prespecified eligibility criteria in order to address a specific research question, aiming to minimise bias by using and documenting explicit, systematic methods.”
However, a full systematic review approach is a substantial research undertaking, and RERs are intended to quickly provide an overview of the research landscape around a particular topic of current interest. The approach is similar to scoping studies, which have characteristics in common with systematic reviews; both involve taking a logical, rigorous approach to searching and synthesis across the researc