Journal for Educational Research Online (JERO): Issue 2/2024, 16. Volume Two Decades of Research Synthesis on Digital Cultural Education:

Digitalization fundamentally increased access to receptive cultural participation for a wide audience and created new opportunities for active participation such as video games and social media. In order to obtain a comprehensive overview, we conducted a tertiary review of published research syntheses on effects of digital cultural activities, mapped their topics and analyzed the research methods applied. We screened n = 5880 raw hits from Scopus, resulting in n = 65 research syntheses that met our inclusion criteria; n = 22 were systematic literature reviews and n = 43 were meta-analyses. The most frequently investigated cultural facet was video games. Traditional facets were less frequently synthesized. While most syntheses focused on online interactions, some syntheses studied activities such as VR, which require special hardware. The included syntheses heavily focused on the research topics “learning” and “subjective well-being and mental health”. Most of the included syntheses on video games and social media focused on negative effects such as addictive or aggressive behavior, positive effects of those activities were synthesized less frequently. The included syntheses also only rarely synthesized qualitative studies. The implications of those desiderata for systematic reviews and empirical original research on digitalization in cultural education are discussed.

Keywords
arts education, digitalization, cultural education, research synthesis, tertiary review