writing and writing and writing

Peer review is a funny old thing. My experience of publishing to date has not changed. Writing about something,  anything, is very subjective. You do it in a way that makes sense to yourself. But will it make sense to others? People have their own preferred style and if yours happens to align with your reviewers then a much smoother journey towards publication will be had.

I'm currently 'resting' my lit review and critique of the project evaluation literature. I've spent too many hours crafting and reading and rewriting. I would love to get it published (wouldn't anyone) but am considering just including it as part of the thesis only.

We had a discussion about this, this week ie whether to continue with Thesis by Publication or to revert to plain old thesis. My thoughts are that publishing matters. If i take time to research and find out information (and write it down) then I want to share that while it is current. As I'm planning to take a long while to complete my PhD, then in 6 or more years time, a lot of this information will be superseded. So I think for now I am sticking with it this way (by publication) and will continue to write and be reviewed.

Another lit review

Parylo, O. (2012). Evaluation of educational administration: A decade review of research (2001–2010). Studies in Educational Evaluation, 38(3–4), 73–83. doi:10.1016/j.stueduc.2012.06.002

This long article (>10,000 words) which reviews the literature and then concludes by calling for a further research study into the topic due to the lack of publications is exactly what I was hoping to do.
There is an introduction, overview of the topic (literature), methodology (which includes list of data sources and method used). The findings section includes a summary of 8 evaluation journals and the types /topics of articles included therein followed by a summary of the relevant articles and then thematic trends. The discussion section is just 4 paras and the implications just 2 paras and significance and conclusion 2 paras. The section on limitations describes some good points and I feel this is an area missing from my paper. It mentions that unpublished data is overlooked, coding only done by one researcher hence researcher bias. In the implications section, a call is made for further research into the foci of educational evaluation and their purposes. The evaluation due to grant requirements is mentioned and a call is made 'to better understand how program evaluation is being used in education and what should be done to improve its effectiveness' p.81.
I particularly like how the method is referenced (p76):

The type and purpose of program evaluation articles were determined according to the classification of Stufflebeam (2001). Overall, this analysis used common strategies of qualitative content analysis (as summarized by Romanowski, 2009): (1) careful examination of the textual data (i.e., published articles); (2) data reduction (i.e., selecting those articles that would help to answer research questions); (3) organizing condensed data (i.e., organizing the articles in groups); and (4) revisiting the data to confirm the findings.