Complexity in the education sector, as well as continuing societal transformation, and the diversity of interdisciplinary and mutually influencing thematic areas within the field, all call for a reflection on methodological approaches to assess, represent and analyse evidence. Research syntheses offer one opportunity to investigate such dynamic research processes. This panel contributes to this complex issue by interrogating how diversity can be processed through methods of research synthesis in the field of educational technology. In this context, diversity relates to the scope of topics in digitising, as well as methods that are internationally applied to the research field of digitalisation and education. Furthermore, the topic of digitalisation implies an inherent form of diversity, as it does not only affect one single area in isolation, but rather impacts and influences all aspects of society, leading to various approaches of how to understand and study digitalisation.

Since the 2000s, research syntheses have reached a growing significance in social sciences generally (Booth et al., 2016; Petticrew & Roberts, 2006) but also within educational research in particular (Gough et al., 2017; Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020; Bedenlier et al., 2023). One reason for this is that by conducting research syntheses, scientists aim to systematically categorise a constantly growing body of literature. In this panel, we will take digitalisation in education as an example to discuss how far the method can be used to assess a dynamic research field – given a research situation that is highly international, interdisciplinary, heterogeneous (diversity of research designs) and often diffuse (unclear body of literature sources). Such a state of research seems typical for literature on transformation processes in general.

The panel will also query the complexity of assessing such research fields with profound methods and categorizing them qualitatively. A further methodological challenge emerges from the handling of a topic that has global application, like many current transformation processes, but is nonetheless shaped by cultural contexts and regional or national developments. For example, an investigation of factors that influence digitalisation in schools cannot do without international best-practice experience. At the same time, conditions of schools and school systems vary greatly within and across countries. These constellations require both an intensive treatment of international discourses and of local contexts, as well as a critical reflection on the benefits and challenges of translation and transfer of research, including bias within research syntheses.

The panel contributions focus on reviews of digitalisation in education from varying perspectives and will consider a range of review types (Sutton et al., 2019), discussing their advantages and challenges: (1) a series of critical reviews which systematically assess and then categorise and discuss literature, (2) a review of reviews, wherein statements from selected reviews are synthesised, (3) a rapid living review, where systematic methods are used within a shorter time frame, and the corpus is updated regularly to reflect extant literature. All three papers reflect international research and were conducted by scientists based in Norway, Germany and Australia. Within the field of digital education the thematic scope from the three examples ranges from different digital teaching aids, tools and resources to questions of management and organizational structures.

Moreover, all the three contributions will investigate the role reviews might play in societies that are characterised by diversity and dynamic transformation processes. To pursue this issue, a discussant from the United Kingdom will finally reflect the examples to assess the role of research syntheses in the context of knowledge societies and Open Science.

Bedenlier, S., Buntins, K., Kerres, M. & Wilmers, A. (eds.) (2023/ in preparation). Forschungssynthesen in der Mediendidaktik. Ansätze und Herausforderungen. Themenheft der Zeitschrift für Medienpädagogik. Booth, A., Sutton, A. & Papaioannou, D. (2016). Systematic approaches to a successful literature review. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi: SAGE. Gough, D., Oliver, S. & Thomas, J. (eds.). (2017). An Introduction to Systematic Reviews. Los Angeles: SAGE. Petticrew, M. & Roberts, H. (2006). Systematic reviews in the social sciences. A practical guide. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Pub. Sutton, A., Clowes, M., Preston, L., & Booth, A. (2019). Meeting the review family: exploring review types and associated information retrieval requirements. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 36(3), 202–222. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hir.12276 Zawacki-Richter, O., Kerres, M., Bedenlier, S., Bond, M. & Buntins, K. (eds.). (2020). Systematic Reviews in Educational Research. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.