2023/10/16 by Van Praag, Lore, Daenekindt, Stijn
paper · doi:10.58002/w899-t243
Abstract: Numerous scientific disciplines have shown a strong interest in studying ethnicity and race in the context of secondary education. This has resulted in a proliferation of discipline-specific perspectives on the subject, each characterized by its own blind spots. Objective. Previous reviews have applied a disciplinary approach and exclusively consider studies from one discipline. We depart from this approach and explicitly choose not to use discipline as a criterion for the studies we include. In this way, our systematic review is able to identify disciplinary blind spots and to present an interdisciplinary overview. Methodology. We study English-language articles published in Web of Science (1990-2019) on ethnicity/race/migration and secondary education/high school/comprehensive education/middle school and include all 7,620 research articles in our analysis. We analyse abstracts of these articles using automated text analysis. More specifically, we apply Topic Models to identify the core themes in the included articles. Results. We identify three clusters of topics, focusing on 1) health, 2) performance, enrolment and equity in education, and 3) psychological aspects. We discuss these clusters in depth with regard to the ways they examine the relationship between ethnicity/race and education. Conclusion. Our analysis reveals discipline-specific perspectives in the study of ethnicity/race in the context of secondary education. It also identifies gaps in the literature, within and across disciplines. In this way, the article provides researchers with insights on how they could learn from other perspectives on ethnicity/race and secondary education and stimulates interdisciplinary research.