A Systematic Review of Studies on Classroom Management from 1980 to 2019

Introduction This review study aims to reveal trends in classroom management research by employing a two-stage analysis of articles indexed by the Web of Science. The bibliometric analysis results indicated the descriptive statistics of the articles, the most productive countries and authors, the most popular articles, journals, and keywords, annual scientific production, growth of the top three journals by year, and the pioneer and influencer researchers in classroom management. The content analysis results showed the changes in the selection of methods, purposes, and participants for nearly three decades of classroom management research. This review concluded that interest in classroom management has been constantly growing, but research on classroom management is not prevalent worldwide.

places where education and training take place.There is a need for a system that will be effective in learning and teaching activities.Maintaining the order, using classroom-teaching materials effectively and efficiently, and supporting the active participation of all students in the classroom require important classroom management knowledge and skills.The main purpose of effective classroom management is to achieve the basic objectives of education by creating a positive classroom and an efficient learning environment.In this respect, classroom management aims to ensure the regular practice of class-life and self-control of all students.The key to becoming an effective teacher is to have effective classroom management.Marzano et al. (2003) highlighted that it is very difficult or even impossible for a classroom teacher who is not effective in managing the classroom, actively participating in classroom activities and using his/ her time efficiently and achieving the necessary tasks.Therefore, it can be said that in the absence of effective classroom management, students will have no active participation, and in the absence of active participation no effective learning can be achieved.Some research showed that active participation in the lesson has a very strong effect on learning (Baker et al., 2008;Greenwood et al., 2002).The research results showed that with effective classroom management, undesirable behaviors of the majority of students can be prevented, and students' participation in classes will increase (Arın et al., 2016;Soodak, 2003).A systematic review is a scientific study that examines original research on a subject through certain methods.The systematic review is the most powerful and useful source of evidence to guide implementation (Stevens, 2001).In a standard literature review, there is a possibility of researcher's bias.In systematic review, researcher's bias is prevented and minimized.
Research is evaluated according to methodological strengths and weaknesses.In a systematic review, all relevant research is sampled and evaluated.The characteristics and results of each study are summarized, digitized, coded and a database is created.The benefit of the systematic review is that it incorporates all available studies into a single report, summarizing a large amount of information and making it usable.The most important advantage of the systematic review is that it increases the power and validity of the cause-effect relationship (Stevens, 2001).Studies with the systematic review of classroom management might provide evidence-based insight into how teachers can effectively manage classrooms.However, systematic reviews of this topic are limited (Oliver et al., 2011).Although there have been attempts to review classroom management research systematically (Håkansson, 2015;Korpershoek et al., 2016;Maggin et al., 2011;Simonsen et al., 2008), these studies do not cover all types of classroom management studies.Therefore, these review studies were unable to capture all trends related to classroom management research.
Classroom management is broadly defined as everything a teacher does to create an environment for both academic and behavioral education (Evertson & Weinstein, 2006).Research on classroom management aims to identify individual practices to support education within classrooms.These effective practices are then combined into a package for more effective education.Systematic reviews should examine classroom management as an efficient package of these practices to contribute to the existing literature.For this purpose, a more comprehensive review of existing research on classroom management should be conducted by identifying studies directly related to classroom management and published in high quality journals.Therefore, this study aims to systematically review all classroom management studies to reveal research trends over time, the most productive scholars and journals interested in classroom management, and the countries in which articles are based through a bibliometric analysis of articles indexed by the Web of Science (WoS).It is also aimed to conduct a content analysis of the articles to reveal detailed information about the methods, purposes, and participants of these studies.This systematic analysis may provide researchers with a big picture of the developments in research on classroom management.

Method
The research on classroom management was examined through bibliometric and content analysis methods.First, a bibliometric analysis draws the quantitative aspects of classroom management research by presenting the statistics related to the journals, countries, and authors.A content analysis of available full-text articles showed detailed information about the methods, purposes, and participants of these studies.
The bibliometric analysis is the application of statistical methods to published papers (Pritchard, 1969).This analysis reveals the statistics of keywords, citations, authors, sources, and countries, thus enabling researchers to explore and compare these statistics.The use of bibliometrics in educational research is new.
The rationale for selecting studies and a database is affected by the practicality of this research.As the WoS database indexes only rigorous studies from topranked journals of the world and stores many details of the papers can be analyzed through the bibliometrix (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017) R (Ihaka & Gentleman, 1996) package used in this study, articles directly related to classroom management were gathered from this database.To determine which articles clearly focus on classroom management, the first 100 articles out of 1132 that include the term "classroom management" in the title, abstract, and keywords are carefully examined.Then the results revealed that the articles including the term in their titles are directly related to classroom management.Therefore, the database search is conducted using the title field only.The timeframe of these studies is between 1980 and 2019.Because the first study directly related to classroom management on the WoS database appears in 1980, and since it takes up to six months for the database to index all the articles in a year, studies from 2020 were excluded, and 273 studies from 1980 to until the end of 2019 were selected (Table 1).The Arts & Humanities Citation Index, (AHCI), Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded), and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) ) indexes on the WoS database were selected.The Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) was not selected due to its lack of rigor (Bozkus, 2019).For the content analysis, the full texts of the 273 articles were tried to be retrieved, but 210 full texts were available (Table 2).Most of the articles that did not have full texts were published before 1991.The analysis aimed to reveal the methods, purposes, and participants in these studies.

Results
The results of this study are presented in two sections.First, the bibliometric analysis results are elaborated using tables and figures.Then, the content analysis results are represented in a single table.

Results of the Bibliometric Analysis
The bibliometric analysis begins with descriptive statistics of the articles included in the analysis ( The source countries of the articles are presented in Table 4.Most articles were written by authors from the United States of America (USA) (n = 151).The other countries in the top five were Germany (n = 23), Turkey (n = 22), Netherlands (n = 9), and Australia (n = 9).
The 20 authors who published most of the articles are presented in Table 5. Carolyn M. Evertson was the author who published most articles (n = 8).
In terms of author scientific productivity, most of the authors (n = 494) published one article only (Table 6).

Figure 1 Historical Direct Citation Network
The annual scientific production is illustrated in Figure 2. It can also be seen in Table 1.The number of articles directly related to classroom management has increased year by year.There has been a dramatic increase after 2005.However, the number of journals in the field of education indexed by the WoS database has also increased dramatically from around 100 to over 200 after 2005.Therefore, the increase in the number of articles directly related to classroom management might be due to this change in the database.

Figure 2 Annual Scientific Production
The keywords used by the authors are presented in Table 8.The most frequently used keyword was classroom management (n = 82).Based on these results, a word cloud is generated (Figure 3).

Content Analysis Results
The content analysis of 210 articles resulted in the following three categories: method, purpose, and participants (Table 10).In the methods category, more than half of the articles Finally, two articles included school administrators as research participants only.As some articles had multiple groups of participants, the total number of participant groups exceeded the number of articles.

Discussion
This study aimed to reveal trends in classroom management research through a two-stage analysis.
The bibliometric analysis results identified the descriptive statistics of the articles, the most productive countries and authors, the most popular articles, journals, and keywords, annual scientific production, the growth of the top three journals by year, and the pioneer and influencer researchers in classroom management.The content analysis results showed the changes in the selection of methods, purposes, and participants for nearly three decades of classroom management research.To the best of our knowledge, so far, this is the first systematic review of all research directly related to classroom management.
The bibliometric analysis results revealed that the USA is the leading country in classroom management research.This may be because the higher education institutions in the USA than in other countries.This may also be partly because many journals indexed in the WoS database are US-based.Similar results were found in previous research (Bryman, 2007;Esen et al., 2018;Gumus et al., 2018).The content analysis results revealed that the number of quantitative studies in classroom management is greater than the number of qualitative, mixed methods, theoretical and systematic review studies.Qualitative research aims to explore the in-depth meaning of a phenomenon that is not well known.However, quantitative research aims to understand how a relatively well-known phenomenon affects a large population.As classroom management research is not in the early development stage, most researchers preferred using quantitative methods to reveal and generalize the effects of phenomena.Only a few studies employed mixed methods to research classroom management.This may be because mixed methods research is difficult to conduct, needs experience in both quantitative and qualitative methods, and requires more resources and time.The findings also revealed that articles aimed to reveal either perception of research participants on different aspects of classroom management or various practices employed by the participants

Conclusion
This review has proved that interest in classroom management is constantly growing.Year by year, more researchers examine perceptions on different aspects of classroom management, various practices educators employ, and the effects of new models, interventions, or programs.This implies that increasing pressures of accountability systems and high-stake testing may direct researchers to focus on improving the classroom management of teachers.As teachers' classroom management skills are crucial to making education process effective, research in this area should use quantitative methods more frequently to find ways to improve classroom management practice.However, research on classroom management is not prevalent worldwide.The issue of improving the classroom management of teachers should be independent of the pressures of accountability systems and high-stake testing, and should attract the attention of all researchers around the world.
most cited articles are presented in Table 7.The article authored by Brouwers and Tomic, titled "A longitudinal study of teacher burnout and perceived self-efficacy in classroom management," published in Teaching and Teacher Education in 2000, was cited 378 times and 19.89 times on average per year.The historical direct citation network is presented in Figure 1.Emmer and Evertson were the pioneering authors as their articles have influenced several research through decades.Then, Brouwers et al. influenced the waves of research after the 2000s.

Figure 3
Figure 3Word Cloud of Author Keywords(Excluding Classroom  Management) (n = 119) employed quantitative methods, while the other most-used methods were qualitative (n = 42), theoretical review (n = 37), mixed methods (n = 8), and systematic review (n = 4).As the number of articles has increased after 2005, it makes sense that the use of these methods has also increased after 2005.However, after 2005, the use of quantitative methods has increased considerably.In the purpose category, more than half of the articles (n = 120) aimed to reveal either perception of research participants on different aspects of classroom management or various practices employed by the participants.Almost a quarter of the articles (n = 49) determined the effect of a model, intervention, or a program.The remaining 41 articles aimed to conceptualize a theory or research trend of classroom management.In the participants category, almost half of the articles (n = 103) included teachers in their samples.Students were participants in 58 research articles.Theoretical and systematic review articles (n = 43) had no participants.Parents, teacher candidates, supervisors, and other school stakeholders were participants in 35 studies.

Table 1
Number of Articles on Classroom Management Included in the Bibliometric Analysis

Table 4
The Number of Articles Per Country (Limited to theFirst 20)

Table 5
The Most Productive Authors (Limited to the First 20)

Table 6
Author Scientific Productivity

Table 7
The 20 Articles, Which Had the Most Citations(Journal Names Are Abbreviated)

Table 9
The Journals, Which Published the Most Articles(Limited to the First 20)

Table 10 The
Results of the Content Analysis