Children, adolescents and young adults from socially disadvantaged families face educational barriers in the acquisition of competences or the access to learning opportunities (Hadjar & Gross, 2016; Maaz & Dumont, 2019; among others). While there is broad research on how and where educational barriers occur and arise, fewer studies exist on how disadvantages in education can be compensated or prevented in Germany. Also, researchers have mainly investigated the overcoming of educational barriers in formal education settings (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2020, p. 79). Most importantly, comprehensive systematic reviews on overcoming educational barriers do not exist for Germany. Our aim is thus to systemise research on processes, measures and programs for overcoming educational barriers in different learning environments ─ formal, non-formal and informal ─ in Germany. We will include studies concerning educational inequality from birth up to the transition to post-secondary education (age range 0-27). We will consider empirical qualitative and quantitative longitudinal and cross-sectional studies from the social and educational sciences and related disciplines. We focus on educational barriers which are (re-)produced or increased, e.g., by the social or ethnic background, gender, physical or mental impairment (Wenzel, 2008, p. 430). We intend to identify measures which prevent such mechanisms of exclusion and which consequently promote diversity. For the intended review, we need to consider a broad range of criteria of finding and selecting relevant studies (Newman & Gough, 2020). Resulting challenges in the literature search and screening processes will be the focus of the presentation. Central questions are: How can we generate a systematic search strategy to produce a resource-oriented outcome? How to deal with technical restrictions of the literature database? How can we define selection criteria so that different reviewers follow a unified screening procedure? How to document screening decisions in a detailed and transparent way? The paper will illustrate innovative automated solutions to these questions. The literature found with search terms related to ‘overcoming educational barriers’ was post-hoc filtered for search terms related to social inequality and social background using R (R Core Team, 2020; package stringr, Wickham, 2019), which allowed for a more economic search procedure. An electronic questionnaire guides the reviewer through the screening process and documents each decision. These new methods facilitate and systemize literature search and screening processes. As an outlook, we will present first results and discuss implications for educational research.

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