EDD9952 moves from identifying a problem of practice to building a rigorous case for a specific improvement approach — a synthesized literature review and a guiding theoretical or conceptual framework.
Synthesizing the education research literature
EDD9952 requires a comprehensive, synthesized review of the education research literature related to the identified problem of practice, going beyond summarizing individual studies to critically evaluate what the field genuinely knows about effective interventions for this type of problem, and where meaningful uncertainty or contradiction remains.
Selecting a guiding theoretical or conceptual framework
The course requires selecting a framework — whether an educational change model, an implementation science framework, or a discipline-specific theory relevant to the problem (like a specific learning theory or organizational culture model) — to guide how the eventual improvement intervention will be designed. Students learn that an intervention designed without an explicit guiding framework risks repeating well-documented mistakes the literature has already identified.
Key topics in EDD9952
- Conducting a systematic, synthesized education research literature review
- Critically evaluating the strength and consistency of evidence for potential interventions
- Selecting an appropriate theoretical or conceptual framework for the improvement project
- Applying educational change models or implementation science frameworks to project design
- Identifying gaps and contradictions in the existing education research base
- Connecting the literature review directly to eventual intervention design choices
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Worked example: how a literature review shapes framework selection
- Literature finding: Similar attendance interventions succeeded when they included strong family-school communication and failed when implemented as purely punitive, compliance-based approaches
- Framework implication: This points toward selecting a relational, family-engagement-oriented framework rather than a compliance/enforcement model
- Design consequence: The eventual intervention design will need to build in genuine family communication and relationship-building components, not rely on attendance policy enforcement alone
- Lesson: The literature review directly shapes which framework — and ultimately which intervention design — is likely to actually succeed in this context
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Frequently asked questions
A literature review can establish that a general type of intervention has worked in similar contexts, but without an explicit theoretical or conceptual framework, a doctoral candidate risks designing an intervention that ignores well-documented reasons why similar efforts have failed elsewhere — frameworks like educational change models or implementation science frameworks are specifically built to account for factors like stakeholder buy-in, organizational culture, and change-readiness that determine whether an evidence-based practice actually gets adopted and sustained in a real school or district setting. EDD9952 requires this framework selection because doctoral-level improvement work is expected to be theoretically grounded, not just generally evidence-informed — a framework provides a structured lens for anticipating implementation challenges specific to educational organizations, which tend to have distinctive governance, stakeholder, and cultural dynamics that a generic evidence-based approach might not fully account for.
The framework should be specifically relevant to both the type of problem (attendance, literacy instruction, teacher retention, school culture) and the level of change being targeted (individual student behavior, classroom practice, or organization-wide systemic change) — a framework well-suited to explaining individual student motivation may not be the right lens for a project targeting district-wide policy change, and vice versa. EDD9952 teaches students to select a framework based on genuine fit to both dimensions of their specific problem of practice, rather than defaulting to whichever framework they happen to be most familiar with from prior coursework — a mismatch between the framework's actual explanatory focus and the problem's actual nature and scope is a common weakness in EdD proposals, and one that a careful literature review specifically helps prevent by revealing which frameworks have actually been used successfully for genuinely similar problems.