In 2013, Kovar and Ball published a literature review on the agricultural literacy research conducted from 1988 to 2011. As a result of their study, they located 49 articles published in that time frame. Since then, agricultural literacy research has been designated as the number one priority by the American Association of Agricultural Education's…

Meta-analyses have become the gold standard for synthesizing evidence from multiple clinical trials, and they are especially useful when outcomes are rare or adverse since individual trials often lack sufficient power to detect a treatment effect. However, when zero events are observed in one or both treatment arms in a trial, commonly used…

Background The CLUSTER model of searching was proposed as a systematic method of searching for studies for reviews of complex interventions. Aim: The method has not been evaluated before. This methodological review identified and evaluated a sample of evidence syntheses that have used CLUSTER. Methods: A forward citation search on the seed CLUSTER…

Introduction: The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) reviews rigorous research on educational interventions with a goal of identifying "what works" and making that information accessible to educators and policymakers. In rating the quality of causal research, the WWC has historically prioritized internal validity over external validity. One…

During drug development, evidence can emerge to suggest a treatment is more effective in a specific patient subgroup. Whilst early trials may be conducted in biomarker-mixed populations, later trials are more likely to enroll biomarker-positive patients alone, thus leading to trials of the same treatment investigated in different populations. When…

In Bayesian random-effects meta-analysis, the use of weakly informative prior distributions is of particular benefit in cases where only a few studies are included, a situation often encountered in health technology assessment (HTA). Suggestions for empirical prior distributions are available in the literature but it is unknown whether these are…

Systematic reviews have witnessed significant growth across many fields, including education. In this article, we outline the background of this growth, highlight the tendency to focus on methodological considerations, and propose a framework to support education researchers in preparing systematic reviews with broad impact. We draw on our…

Risk of bias (RoB) assessments are a core element of evidence synthesis but can be time consuming and subjective. We aimed to develop a decision rule-based algorithm for RoB assessment of seroprevalence studies. We developed the SeroTracker-RoB algorithm. The algorithm derives seven objective and two subjective critical appraisal items from the…

The exponential increase in published articles makes a thorough and expedient review of literature increasingly challenging. This review delineated automated tools and platforms that employ artificial intelligence (AI) approaches and evaluated the reported benefits and challenges in using such methods. A search was conducted in 4 databases…

We have entered an era in which scientific evidence increasingly informs research practice and policy. As there is an exponential increase in the use of single-case experimental designs (SCEDs) to evaluate intervention effectiveness, there is accumulating evidence available for quantitative synthesis. Consequently, there is a growing interest in…

This article reports on a comprehensive synthesis of the literature on the role of working memory in second language (L2) writing. It starts with an overview and clarification of the construct and measurement of working memory, followed by an elaboration of major theoretical models informing the synthesized research. The article then presents a…

In evidence-based practice, new topics generally only have a few studies available for synthesis. As a result, the evidence of such meta-analyses raised substantial concerns. We investigated the robustness of the evidence from these earliest studies. Real-world data from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) were collected. We…

This article sheds light on criticism of the increasing degree of formalisation in collating and synthesising research findings in the systematic review format in education. A textual analysis of two systematic reviews produced by the Swedish Institute for Educational Research unpacks the significance of interaction between formalisation and…

This extensive bibliometric analysis examines Augmented Reality (AR) adoption and its effects on chemistry education from 2002 to 2023. AR's interaction, threedimensional visualizations of molecular structures and reactions prove as a promising method for chemical concepts that are ever-increasingly sophisticated and for educational methods that…

Reviewing complex interventions is challenging because they include many elements that can interact dynamically in a nonlinear manner. A systems perspective offers a way of thinking to help understand complex issues, but its application in evidence synthesis is not established. The aim of this project was to understand how and why systems…