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The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for scholars carrying out reviews of research that meet international standards for publication.

This is primarily a conceptual paper focusing on the methodology of conducting systematic reviews of research. However, the paper draws on a database of reviews of research previously conducted in educational leadership and management. In a separate effort, the author identified 40 reviews of research that had been published in educational leadership conducted over the past five decades. The paper draws upon narrative examples from the empirical review as a means of clarifying and elaborating on the elements of the conceptual framework. The paper also refers to specific findings from the earlier paper in order to illustrate broader trends with respect to how the various elements of the framework have been employed in exemplary reviews.

As scholars working across a broad range of scientific fields suggest, high quality reviews of research represent a potentially powerful means of reducing the gap between research and practice. Yet, the quality of research reviews conducted in educational leadership and management remain highly variable in methodological rigor. This paper provides a conceptual framework and language that scholars might use to guide the conduct and evaluation of future research reviews in educational leadership and management.

The contribution of this paper lies first in highlighting the need for scholars to employ systematic methods when conducting research reviews in educational leadership and management. Beyond this broad purpose, the paper provides a framework for decision‐making at different points in the review process, and a set of criteria or standards by which authors, readers and reviewers can judge the quality of a research review. It is hoped that this conceptual framework can provide useful methodological guidance that will enhance longstanding efforts in our field to advance knowledge in a more systematic and coherent fashion.

This originality of this paper lies in its adaptation and application of recent methodological advances in conducting reviews of research across the natural and social sciences to the field of educational leadership and management. A search of core journals in educational leadership and management found not a single paper that discussed methods of conducting reviews of research. The paper offers a clear framework that will allow future scholars in educational leadership and management to improve the quality of their research reviews.

The purpose of this paper is to do methodological review of the literature on educational leaders and emotions that includes 49 empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 1992 and 2012.

The work systematically analyzes descriptive information, methods, and designs in these studies, and their development over time.

The review suggests that scholarly interest in educational leaders and emotions has increased over time, and identifies methodological patterns in this body of research. The results are compared with methodological data from other syntheses in the disciplines of educational administration (EA) and organizational behavior for the purpose of using the findings to produce broader insights into the meaning of an emerging research field in EA.

The findings of the methodological review are interpreted from two conceptual perspectives: functionalist and critical. Together, they offer a holistic portrayal of the meaning of producing scientific knowledge in an emerging research field in EA.

This study, by critically analyzing material from multiple sources, aims to provide an overview of what is available on evaluation tools for educational apps for children. To realize this objective, a systematic literature review was conducted to search all English literature published after January 2010 in multiple electronic databases and internet sources. Various combinations of search strings were used due to database construction differences, while the results were cross-referenced to discard repeated references, obtaining those that met the criteria for inclusion.

The present study was conducted according to the methods provided by Khan et al. (2003) and Thomé et al. (2016). The whole procedure included four stages: planning the review, identifying relevant studies in the literature, critical analysis of the literature, summarizing and interpreting the findings (Figure 1). Furthermore, in this analysis, a well-known checklist, PRISMA, was also used as a recommendation (Moher et al., 2015).

These review results reveal that, although there are several evaluation tools, in their majority they are not considered adequate to help teachers and parents to evaluate the pedagogical affordances of educational apps correctly and easily. Indeed, most of these tools are considered outdated. With the emergence of new issues such as General Data Protection Regulation, the quality criteria and methods for assessing children's products need to be continuously updated and adapted (Stoyanov et al., 2015). Some of these tools might be considered as good beginnings, but their “limited dimensions make generalizable considerations about the worth of apps” (Cherner, Dix and Lee, 2014, p. 179). Thus, there is a strong need for effective evaluation tools to help parents and teachers when choosing educational apps (Callaghan and Reich, 2018).

Even though this work is performed by following the systematic mapping guideline, threats to the validity of the results presented still exist. Although custom strings that contained a rich collection of data were used to search for papers, potentially relevant publications that would have been missed by the advanced search might exist. It is recommended that at least two different reviewers should independently review titles, abstracts and later full papers for exclusion (Thomé et al., 2016). In this study, only one reviewer – the author – selected the papers and did the review. In the case of a single researcher, Kitchenham (2004) recommends that the single reviewer should consider discussing included and excluded papers with an expert panel. The researcher, following this recommendation, discussed the inclusion and exclusion procedure with an expert panel of two professionals with research experience from the Department of (removed for blind review). To deal with publication bias, the researcher in conjunction with the expert panel used the search strategies identified by Kitchenham (2004) including: Grey literature, conference proceedings, communicating with experts working in the field for any unpublished literature.

The purpose of this study was not to advocate any evaluation tool. Instead, the study aims to make parents, educators and software developers aware of the various evaluation tools available and to focus on their strengths, weaknesses and credibility. This study also highlights the need for a standardized app evaluation (Green et al., 2014) via reliable tools, which will allow anyone interested to evaluate apps with relative ease (Lubniewski et al., 2018). Parents and educators need a reliable, fast and easy-to-use tool for the evaluation of educational apps that is more than a general guideline (Lee and Kim, 2015). A new generation of evaluation tools would also be used as a reference among the software developers, designers to create educational apps with real educational value.

The results of this study point to the necessity of creating new evaluation tools based on research, either in the form of rubrics or checklists to help educators and parents to choose apps with real educational value.

However, to date, no systematic review has been published summarizing the available app evaluation tools. This study, by critically analyzing material from multiple sources, aims to provide an overview of what is available on evaluation tools for educational apps for children.

Nowadays, networks are the basic core of social organization and interaction; consequently, networking has become an indispensable requirement in today's societies. In education, the development of different types of collaborative networks has been observed, leading, in recent years, to the creation of educational macro-networks that generate links between schools and different types of institutions. Therefore, this study consists of a systematic review to examine the most relevant findings on this type of educational macro-networks. The authors’ objectives were: to examine the main characteristics of this type of networks; to analyze the consequences they cause; and to determine which aspects contribute to or hinder their construction and development.

A bibliographic search was carried out in Web of Science, SCOPUS and Education Resources Information Center, which yielded a total of 29 studies that were analyzed thematically using Nvivo software.

Among the most noteworthy results are: the wide variety of existing structures; the benefits they generate in terms of learning outcomes, educational equity and the reduction of inequalities; and the influence exerted by the type of leadership and policies in the development of this macro-networks. Finally, future lines of research and policy implications for practice are highlighted.

In this society, networks have become the basic core of an organization and the new form of social interaction. As a result, networks have begun to play a fundamental role in today's societies, even permeating various spheres such as education. In this context, it is essential to analyse this type of relationship in the field of education in order to truly understand its implications in this sector as well as its development and structure.

Despite a legacy of research that emphasizes contradictions and their role in explaining change, less is understood about their character or the mechanisms that support them. This gap is especially problematic when making causal claims about the sources of institutional change and our overall conceptions of how institutions matter in social meanings and organizational practices. If we treat contradictions as a persistent societal feature, then a primary analytic task is to distinguish their prevalence from their effects. We address this gap in the context of US electoral discourse and education through an analysis of presidential platforms. We ask how contradictions take hold, persist, and might be observed prior to, or independently of, their strategic use. Through a novel combination of content analysis and computational linguistics, we observe contradictions in qualitative differences in form and quantitative differences in degree. Whereas much work predicts that ideologies produce contradictions between groups, our analysis demonstrates that they actually support convergence in meaning between groups while promoting contradiction within groups.

This article employs a system analytic framework to categorize the available research literature on the politics of education in order to explain the inter‐relationship of private and public interests and of different levels in primary and secondary American schools. The objectives are several: to explain and develop the analytical framework of David Easton; to illustrate its heuristic utility by categorizing empirically‐based research within the components of that framework, and to suggest and encourage future research directions in the subject. Education has escaped application of traditional policy analysis in America because educators have convinced scholars and laymen that they are “non‐political,” a label which even most political scientists have accepted without challenge. However, during the 1960s, a few scholars in education and political science began to apply political analytical methods to public school conflict. This research has begun to change perceptions of education and to provide a beginning set of research projects whose data support tentative generalization about the policy‐making process and the total system of public schools. This orientation is bound to increase because of increasing national government intervention in local schools, both through integration and financial policies. These have provoked growing conflict locally over the proper direction of school policies. In this article, we see how such stress is transmitted in the form of “demands” and “supports” into the “political system”, that persistent social mechanism known in all societies in different forms provides an “authoritative allocation of values and resources”. The political system, in this case public school bodies, “converts” such “inputs” into “outputs” of public policy, which in their administration create outcomes which later cause a “feedback” into the political system as the material for new policy demands. For each component of this Eastonian system, this article examines relevant research, providing an extensive annotated bibliography. From this review, it is possible to suggest lines of needed research.

The objective of this chapter is to analyze educational leadership policy in New Jersey, US, and Ontario, Canada, focusing on the inclusion of the unique needs of systematically marginalized students, specifically refugees and forced immigrant (RFI) youth. Modes of inquiry are qualitative document analysis of New Jersey and Ontario leadership policies, preparation requirements, and standards. The objective of this paper is to present an extensive literature review of policies related to educational leadership and supporting RFI youth and their teachers as well as to reveal gaps in policies and examine pre- and in-service training requirements. Within the field of comparative and international education, this chapter highlights the institutionalization of trends in educational leadership at state or provincial levels and how these macro-level policies influence educators’ abilities to meet the needs of students from marginalized communities, such as refugees and immigrants.

This systematic review paper aims to examine extant empirical research involving educational technology during COVID-19 to provide an aggregated analysis of how the pandemic has influenced educational technology research.

Using a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis systematic review and an integrative review methodology, 50 primary research studies were selected from ten top-ranked educational research journals. These studies were reviewed regarding research purposes, methodologies, instruments, educational level, geographical distribution, and findings of the studies.

The findings reveal four emerging themes: influencing factors, effectiveness, challenges and teachers. The majority of the studies focused on higher education. Quantitative research design based on a questionnaire was the most adopted method of investigation by researchers.

Search parameters focused on the top 10 journals in the field of educational technology. Although this provides a level of quality, it narrowed the search.

For practitioners and researchers, this study provides a summary of the field to better understand what knowledge we have gained on the use of educational technology to enable a more agile, knowledgeable response to education in future emergencies.

This systematic review is unique in examining how the pandemic has influenced educational technology research. It also provides insight into gaps in the research that future researchers can use as a springboard to enable a more knowledge and a more agile approach to future emergencies.

Educational data mining (EDM) and learning analytics, which are highly related subjects but have different definitions and focuses, have enabled instructors to obtain a holistic view of student progress and trigger corresponding decision-making. Furthermore, the automation part of EDM is closer to the concept of artificial intelligence. Due to the wide applications of artificial intelligence in assorted fields, the authors are curious about the state-of-art of related applications in Education.

This study focused on systematically reviewing 1,219 EDM studies that were searched from five digital databases based on a strict search procedure. Although 33 reviews were attempted to synthesize research literature, several research gaps were identified. A comprehensive and systematic review report is needed to show us: what research trends can be revealed and what major research topics and open issues are existed in EDM research.

Results show that the EDM research has moved toward the early majority stage; EDM publications are mainly contributed by “actual analysis” category; machine learning or even deep learning algorithms have been widely adopted, but collecting actual larger data sets for EDM research is rare, especially in K-12. Four major research topics, including prediction of performance, decision support for teachers and learners, detection of behaviors and learner modeling and comparison or optimization of algorithms, have been identified. Some open issues and future research directions in EDM field are also put forward.

Limitations for this search method include the likelihood of missing EDM research that was not captured through these portals.

This systematic review has not only reported the research trends of EDM but also discussed open issues to direct future research. Finally, it is concluded that the state-of-art of EDM research is far from the ideal of artificial intelligence and the automatic support part for teaching and learning in EDM may need improvement in the future work.