Clarifying definitions: Narrowing in on the scoping review (Phase 1)

During the past couple of weeks, I have been stumped. Having close to 100 potential articles to examine for my scoping review seemed overwhelming. I felt stuck and unsure of how I would get through it efficiently and critically.

In speaking with my supervisor, we clarified what we meant by our research question of looking at how Canadian researchers conceptualize and enact social and emotional learning in schools. What needed to be included, and what process of publication required to be involved?

Peer-reviewed

Ultimately, we narrowed in on peer-reviewed articles. Not only does this represent how Canadian researchers have conceptualized and enacted, but this also means it has been through a review process and supported by other researchers. This easily cut out about 10-15 of the articles I had initially in my examination bin. What was removed was grey literature (e.g., Education Canada articles) and dissertations.

Procedure

So as we mentioned earlier in the project, we wanted to ensure that researchers were discussing the conceptualization of SEL and implementing SEL. For the overall project, this is critical as we want to see how what researchers are thinking and doing relates to what we might be seeing in classrooms. However, I wondered about the type of implementation and measurement that we would require. Did studies need to show an effect? Thus, requiring a pre-post measurement.

After speaking with my supervisor, we decided that as this was a scoping review, the outcomes are less of an interest to the study, as we look at conceptualization and implementation. Therefore, we kept any study that had an implementation, regardless of whether they evaluated the program outcomes using a pre-post design.

This did not decrease the number of studies but helped to clarify my thinking here.

 Close but not quite

I am also keeping track of the studies close to being included but didn’t quite make the cut. This may involve using an outside context/situation/program that occurs as the “program implementation.” For example, one study looked at the impact of the shift to full-day kindergarten in Ontario on SEL. As this wasn’t a program the researcher implemented, the study was not included.

Another example is an article from an educator (no research institution affiliation) published in a peer-reviewed journal. For this article, I am a little on the fence of whether to include it. Perhaps, this means going back to my definition of a researcher in the context of my scoping review.

Other questions

A couple of other questions have emerged as I revaluate the articles included in the scoping review.

• What about multiple articles that are based on the same study? Do they all get included?
• What to do about the articles that I don’t seem to have access to due to lack of online full-text?
  • Due to COVID library access being limited, even if we have the hard copy available, accessing it is difficult.

Currently, I have about 30 articles to analyze and about 30 to try and source. I’ll keep analyzing, and once I’m nearing the end of the first batch, I will reassess accessing the second batch.

Stay tuned, next week, I will be sharing a rough summary of the analyses from the first few articles.

Any thoughts or feedback? Let me know in the comments below!

If you have any questions or would like more information, please feel free to email me at hwoods@uottawa.ca.

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