During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers, school leaders and policymakers needed evidence quickly, in order to inform emergency remote education policy and practice. This paper reports on a rapid review of 89 K-12 studies from around the world, undertaken following the first 7 months of the pandemic. Owing to the frequently changing landscape of the pandemic, a rapid review was chosen over a more extensive systematic review, as this allowed for streamlining and omitting aspects of the reviewing process to enable quicker dissemination (Hamel et al., 2020; Tricco et al., 2020). The rapid review was still undertaken using a transparent and replicable search strategy (Gough et al., 2012), but the number of databases searched was limited to four and a formal quality assessment was not undertaken, although any studies that did not include explicit details of participants with clear empirical data were excluded. This review was also intended to be a living rapid review (Elliott et al., 2014), updated regularly with new studies meeting the inclusion criteria, particularly through the use of machine learning via Microsoft Academic Graph within the evidence synthesis software EPPI-Reviewer (Thomas et al., 2023). Whilst this was initially achievable, the sheer volume of research that has been published on teaching and learning during the pandemic quickly became overwhelming for only one researcher to keep up with, coupled with a changeover of machine learning provider within EPPI-Reviewer to OpenAlex (Priem et al., 2022). This paper will therefore discuss the benefits and challenges of conducting both rapid reviews and living reviews, reflecting on this COVID-19 example, and provide advice for conducting similar reviews in the future.

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