EDU 516 / LIT 530

This section has a lot of information: 

• Where to search for articles
• How to modify your search to find relevant articles
• How to find articles that meet your assignment requirements (recent, research-based articles)
• How to keep track of what you find (left side of the screen)

These three subscription databases are the best ones to search for education-related articles. ERIC & Education Source have the same interface (EBSCOHost), so they will look exactly the same. Education Database is a Proquest database and will look a little different, but overall it should be pretty similar to the other two databases in appearance.  

You'll need to make a few adjustments to your search.

First, there's no such thing as a perfect search - you will likely need to try a few different combinations of keywords in order to find good results. We're going to discuss two methods for coming up with additional keywords and phrases:

• Using the autocomplete suggestions
• Looking at articles' subject headings

Second, you will need to use database limiters to meet some of the requirements of the assignment. Database limiters limit or reduce the number of results you get. The two limiters we'll focus on are:

• The date limiter - because you need to find articles from the last 10 years for this assignment
• The scholarly / peer reviewed limiter - because you need to find research-based articles for this assignment (we'll go over research-based articles in more detail in the Interpreting your results section

A few other search tips you might find handy: 

• Getting too many results, or irrelevant results? Try searching for an exact phrase by putting it in quotes. (ex. "adolescent literacy" vs. adolescent literacy)
• Getting too few results? Consider alternative words or spellings (ex. I found more results when I searched for "communities of practice" than I did when I searched for "community of practice").

Using Autocomplete Suggestions

The screenshot below is from Education Combo. I recommend that you put one concept in each search box, like I did here: 

As you can see in the last box, the autocomplete has offered several useful suggestions. I've chosen "grades or academic performance or academic achievement" in the search below.

Using subject headings & abstracts

After limiting my results to the last 10 years, my search only retrieved 22 results, so I'm going to look at the articles' subjects and abstracts (the summary that appears just above the subjects) for ideas on how I can get more results: 

The result pictured above, Free Lunch for All! The Effect of the Community Eligibility Provision on Academic Outcomes, looks relevant, since it talks about academic outcomes. Looking over the subject headings, there are a few that we might want to try searching for: 

• Luncheons (since it's the closest to our actual search)
• Other Individual and Family Services (this concept and the concepts below are broader than just school lunches, but they might help us find more useful information) 
• Emergency and Other Relief Services
• Health and Welfare Funds
• Public Welfare 

We can also see that, according to the abstract, the "Community Eligibility Provision" is a "universal free-lunch program." That's another term we can look for. 

TIP: Mix and match the concepts you come up with - you'll likely do several different searches, and you may only find a few good articles with each search. Don't worry, this is a normal part of the search process!

In Education Source and ERIC, the most commonly used filters are just below the search box.

Click Peer Reviewed (labeled #1 in the screenshot below) to narrow your results to peer-reviewed, scholarly articles.

Click All Time to narrow your results to the most recent year, 5 years, or 10 years (labeled #2 in the screenshot below). If you want to choose a different time frame, click the All Filters button on the left.

In Education Database, the filters are on the left side of the results page. 

Click the checkbox next to Peer reviewed (labeled #1 in the screenshot below) to narrow your results to peer-reviewed, scholarly articles.

Click the sliders to narrow your results to a particular timeframe, and then click the Update button (labeled #2 in the screenshot below). You can also click "Enter a date range" if you want to enter your own dates.

All research-based articles are peer-reviewed, but not all peer-reviewed journals are research-based. (Need a refresher on what makes a journal scholarly?)

So, how can I tell if an article is research-based?

Unfortunately, there's no filter to limit your results to research-based articles - you'll need to identify them yourself. There are two types of articles to look for:

• Experiments or studies

• Literature reviews

As you review your search results, there are a few things to look for which will help you figure out the difference between these types of articles:

• The title
• The abstract (a one-paragraph summary of the article) 
• The assigned subjects

Let's review a few examples. There are screenshots below, but links are also provided in case you want or need to review the item yourself. 

Example #1

The Title of the first example article is Culturally responsive literacy instruction: How is it reflected in the literature? The title gives us a pretty good idea that it is a literature review. You might see the phrases "literature review," "review of the literature," "systematic review," or "meta-analysis" in the titles of articles that are literature reviews.

The Abstract also gives us useful information, noting that the article is a "qualitative review of the literature." 

In the Subjects section of this example article, we see "Literature reviews" is one of the assigned subjects. (It's underlined in red in the screenshot.) 

Example #2

The Title of the second example article is Listen to the Children: Elementary School Students' Perspectives on a Mindfulness Intervention. The title mentions students' perspectives; this suggests that the authors used some sort of tool or measurement to learn about those perspectives. Many article titles have words that indicate some sort of measurement - look for words like effects, impact, comparison, and others.

The Abstract builds on what we learned from the title; the students completed daily mindfulness activities, and the authors held weekly focus groups to learn their perspectives on these activities. The authors also mention doing a content analysis of the data they gathered from the focus groups.

The Subjects include the phrase "qualitative research," which is one major type of research (the other two are quantitative research and mixed methods research). The assigned subjects also include the phrases "focus groups" and "content analysis," which were in the abstract, too. Both are common data collection methods in qualitative research. For quantitative research, you might see the word "statistics" pop up in the subjects. (The relevant subjects are underlined in red in the screenshot above.)

If you're ever unsure whether an article includes original research, don't hesitate to ask a librarian or your instructor!

Reading scholarly journal articles

For this assignment, you don't really have to read the articles you find, but you will need to do so for the Critical Review of Literature assignment. This guide on how to read a scholarly journal article might be helpful!