Four Types of Literature Reviews Relevant for Assistive

s/he used at the time the work was written. However, how do you know about all the works that cited this particular article? Before Google Scholar, you would need to be an expert to un- derstand the impact of any specific article. Now, you simply need to pay attention to the citation count to have an approximate idea of the article’s impact. For example, if a paper is newly published it may have few, if any citations. If an article is several years old and has few citations, you should probably avoid it. However, when you start to see citation counts in the hundreds or thousands, it signals you should probably become familiar with the article be- cause it has had clear impact on the profession. Because the field of AT is so specialized, it is very common to see articles with ci- tation counts in the 30-150 range. Citation counts above 150 are noteworthy in the field of AT and citation counts above 1000 are articles that everyone should probably be familiar with. FOUR TYPES OF LITERATURE REVIEWS Reviews of the literature are essential for any research project because before we can conduct a new study we need to under- stand what is already known about our topic. Grant applications will often require a review of the literature to demonstrate that there is a need for the project. And, practitioners are often chal- lenged to demonstrate that the interventions we are proposing are evidence-based. As a result, it is increasingly important that AT professionals have a basic understand of literature reviews. Finding the right review of the literature will save hours of work trying to track down different individual studies to make sense of all that is known. The following sections provide a brief intro- duction to four types of literature reviews. Examples of each type of review are included if readers are interested in learning more about the literature review methodology. In some cases, I hope that you will discover a literature review that you didn’t know you needed. Items marked with an * are available from Google Schol- ar. DESCRIPTIVE LITERATURE REVIEWS The most common type of literature review is what is known as a descriptive review of the literature. Here, the author describes the search terms that they wanted to analyze (e.g., virtual reality in special education), a period of time to study (usually the past 5 or 10 years), some inclusionary criteria (i.e., K-12 education, writ- ten in English), and some exclusionary criteria (i.e., conference proceedings, post-secondary education). Then, they analyze the set of article they found and describe the characteristics of the knowledge base. Typically, they will end with a set of recommen- dations for future research (this is especially valuable for student researchers looking to justify a new study!). Finding a literature review on a topic of interest will point you to many more relevant articles that you can track down from the reference list. Here are a few recent descriptive literature reviews that may be of interest to AT professionals. Collins, J. C., & Collet-Klingenberg, L. (2018). Portable electron-

ic assistive technology to improve vocational task completion in young adults with an intellectual disability: A review of the litera- ture. Journal of Intellectual Disabilities, 22(3), 213-232. * Koumpouros, Y., & Kafazis, T. (2019). Wearables and mobile technologies in autism spectrum disorder interventions: A sys- tematic literature review. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 66, 1-25. Mechling, L. C. (2007). Assistive technology as a self-manage- ment tool for prompting students with intellectual disabilities to initiate and complete daily tasks: A literature review. Education and Training in Developmental Disabilities, 42(3), 252-269. * Schreffler, J., Vasquez, E., Chini, J., & James, W. (2019). Universal design for learning in postsecondary STEM education for students with disabilities: A systematic literature review. International Jour- nal of STEM Education, 6(1), 1-10. SCOPING REVIEWS Scoping Reviews are a newer type of literature review. The in- tent of a scoping review is to find as much information on a new topic that may not yet have a large research base. For this reason, there are no limits placed on inclusion and exclusion criteria since the goal is to produce a snapshot of what is known by gathering as many different types of articles that offer opinion, examples from practice, white papers and more. AT professionals trying to make the case for the acquisition of new technologies that may not yet have a research base may wish to search for a scoping re- view or conduct their own. Below are eight examples of recent scoping reviews that may be relevant for the field of AT. * Costantino, M. A., & Bonati, M. (2014). A scoping review of in- terventions to supplement spoken communication for children with limited speech or language skills. PloS One, 9 (3), e90744, 1-15. * Cunningham, B. J., Washington, K. N., Binns, A., Rolfe, K., Rob- ertson, B., & Rosenbaum, P. (2017). Current methods of evaluat- ing speech-language outcomes for preschoolers with commu- nication disorders: A scoping review using the ICF-CY. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60 (2), 447-464. Drager, K. D., & Holyfield, C. (2016). Scoping review of inter- ventions for children who require augmentative and alternative communication is limited by focus on randomized controlled tri- als. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 10 (2), 59-65. * Karem, R.W., Washington, K. N., Crowe, K., Jenkins, A., Leon, M., Kokotek, L., ... & Westby, C. (2019). Current methods of evaluating the language abilities of multilingual preschoolers: A scoping re- view using the International Classification of Functioning, Disabil- ity and Health–Children and Youth version. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 50 (3), 434-451.

BACK TO CONTENTS

Made with FlippingBook Ebook Creator