Writing a literature review.

On our last face to face session, we were told about our literature review. The word then went around how difficult this would be, and how much time it would take.

Our school is right into Personalised learning and we were all going to set up a learning hub within the senior cluster of the school. So this was an easy subject to do my review around, or so I thought.

I started with Personalised Learning and then changed to modern learning environments, innovative classrooms, 21st-century learning, and so the list goes on all have got the same underlining principles but the variety of terms used and acronyms MLE, PL, ILI would make your head spin.

So after reading all the fellow Mindlab students posting on Google communities that they had their question sorted I felt envious so I thought I should go to the Ministry of Education because surely they should have the term sorted. But no ”. “the term personalized learning has been used perhaps too broadly to cover a whole host of strategies and values”. Terms such as Modern Learning Environments, Innovative learning spaces, differentiated, individualised, flexible spaces, 21st-century learning practices, have all been used to explain the same concept by The Ministry of Education.

So after a week of reading. I decided that there were common themes and I researched these also. I was just about ready to give up or completely change my topic when I thought to keep it simple. So I designed a matric for each piece of research that I read. This didn’t really work that well so because my writing was too big to fit in the gaps so I brought home from school 8 large pieces of cartridge paper. I then broke it down into sections,

Intro, stakeholders, history, term, conclusion. A reference list and Kaupapa Māori.

Once I had the ideas down in themes I went away and read more on these sections. I did get sidetracked and drawn into other areas of interest.

I then typed these out linking areas of research. It was very easy to form a question at this point.  At this section, I had 4000 words. I then merged all the information together with a conclusion and reference list, word count 6000… OH NO and 45% similarity.

I then cut out any information that had been repeated. I also cut down all my quotes and one whole section. The last cut I had to make was any research which had been quoted once I cut this and also the reference. This put me right on the magic number of words. Once I put it through Turnitin I found that the word count had dropped and similarity was 35%. But to be honest I had seen enough of this and sent it in.