The Interpretive Review of Educational Matters: Is There Any Other Kind?

All reviews involve combining multiple studies for the purpose of demonstrat-ing their collective relevance for solving some problem, for understanding some issue, for explaining some relationship, and so on. Reviewing is an interpretive undertaking insofar as it is an effort to make sense of these studies and to establish their meaning (Strike Posner, 1983a). A view widely held is that reviews are a means of collecting and organizing the results of previous studies so as to produce a composite of what we have already learned about a particular topic. This approach assumes that knowledge accumulates within a field, and thus under-standing of some phenomenon can be built up piece-by-piece, brick-by-brick, eventually yielding something like a more complete, thorough, and therefore, trustworthy understanding which, in turn, can be more confidently applied to solving a problem of a particular kind. This view is based on a biomedical model of combining multiple single studies that address related or identical causal hypotheses in order to arrive at a valid generalization of a causal relationship. For example, we want to know the efficacy of a treatment A (say some particular