Journal Article

'This review is useful' : The novel knowledge mobilisation contributions of narrative reviews in higher education

Kay Oddone, Margaret K Merga

2025

Overview

While much has been written about the methods that should inform narrative and systematic reviews, far less consideration has been given to their purpose. While the narrative review is a common text type in higher education research, relatively little is known about how these reviews seek to make a novel contribution. Reviews can play a role in facilitating knowledge mobilisation, bridging the gap between academia and end- user purposes for professions, industry, government and the public. Our article reports on a content analysis of a sample of narrative reviews in higher education collected through a systematic method in order to determine if narrative reviews in higher education make a novel knowledge mobilisation contribution, and if so, the kinds of contributions they might make. Findings suggest that most of the contemporary reviews in higher education in the sample included a novel knowledge mobilisation contribution that had been extracted and developed during the review process, demonstrating a common willingness to engage with the review findings to derive practical implications, and these contributions targeted a broad range of topics and potential end-users in higher education.

• Publisher: Institutes for Educational Research in NSW SA and WA
• Subject: Cognition in children / Content analysis / Education, Higher / Evaluation / Exploratory factor analysis / Fiction / Higher education / Imagination in literature / Knowledge level / Knowledge, Theory of, in literature / Narrative inquiry / Study and teaching (Higher) / Systematic reviews / University students / University teaching