I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the lit review is the most tedious section of research essays in the social sciences. When students ask me pointed questions about how to read research papers, I have bluntly opined that if a section needs skipping, this is the section. I mostly glaze over them myself. The literature review is mostly good (and by good, I mean interesting) for one thing: making low-key bitchy comments about other peoples’ substandard research, and for that it is woefully underused.
Frankly, I would much rather read only articles that are good and interesting -like what I tell students to find – but generally peer reviewers demand a level of comprehensiveness that requires me to read the bad and boring ones too. It is of course impossible to be comprehensive on a topic so vast as IL instruction, so my goal is to accurately represent the state of the field until a saturation point, or when my eyes glaze over, whichever comes first.
What I found in this particular review was a preponderance of uncritical thinking towards one of the most prominent/important of librarian duties. One study declared the one-shot session “just enough of a good thing” because students were able to regurgitate the most conservative of perspectives about authority (the US government is a better website than Wikipedia!) weeks after participating in one. This same study asked a bizarre array of demographic questions as a precursor, including of all things, students’ marital status. I was greatly amused by one meta-analysis that included as part of the discussion, all the ways the author had had to correct some of the other studies included.
And yet, there was also interesting thoughts – on the increasing irrelevance of Boolean modifiers, on the importance of reflection and presence to teaching – especially decolonized approaches to teaching, on the “organizational fiction” of librarians as teachers, and on critique as care, a mindest incredibly dear to my heart.
While I suspect my synopsis will be largely passed over by eventual readers, I did learn, and I have new questions and ponderings now, which is usually the greater part of learning anyway.