1. Basic Search
-Type your search term or phrase in the search box. Use “quotation marks” to search for exact phrases. You can use And, Or, Not to combine your search term in basic search.
-Search examples: school readiness, school readiness and children, “school readiness and children”, “school readiness” and children, (school children) and play.
2. Advanced Search
-There are three search boxes connecting the searches by AND, OR, NOT. Type your search term in the first search box, and the second, and third if needed.
-Limit your search by: Publication date, Scholarly/Peer Reviewed Journals, Language, Source type, Full text, etc. depending on the database.
-Search examples: school attendance AND teenagers, teaching OR teacher, teaching NOT teacher.
3. Expert Search or Command Line
-Type your search statement in the search box. Example: the impact on school children and bullying.
Boolean Operators
•AND – Narrows your search. It looks for documents that contain all of your terms and show only those records that contain both. Example: elementary school AND recess
•OR – Broaden your search. It looks for documents that contain either keywords, or both of your terms. Example: teenagers or adolescent or youth
•NOT – Narrows your search. It looks for documents that contain one of your search terms, but not the other. Example: teaching NOT learning
Frequently used Field Codes
•Author –AU (smith), AU (smith, George)
•Title –TI (education)
•Descriptor – DE (lunch)
•Abstract – AB (education)
•Document type –DT(ED for document) or DT (EJ for articles)
Truncation
•Use (*) character at the end of your root word to retrieve variant ending. Example: learn* will retrieve learn, learnt, learning, learners.
Peer-Reviewed: Peer-Reviewed resources include articles from scholarly journals that have gone through a peer-review process. Authors must submit their paper/work for review by other scholars in their field who then edit the paper/work and determine if it’s acceptable for publication.
While searching for articles, you can filter your results to only show peer-reviewed resources. This is usually done with a check-box along the margin of your results list.
Seminal Works: These works often form the building blocks of educational theory. The work of educational scholars like Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and Maria Montessori (1870 - 1952), or publications such as Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals by Benjamin Bloom, published in 1956, are often still referenced today. Though they may seem "out-of-date," the concepts presented are still fundamental to modern teaching and learning.
Methods or Methodology: How the study in the article was done. Examples:
Annotated Bibliography: This starts with a works cited or reference list, then adds to each citation an annotation, or brief summary, of what the resource is about and why it was used by the author of the bibliography. Resources remain formatted as a list following the citation style used. Get help writing an annotated bibliography here.
Literature Review: Like an annotated bibliography, each resource and its pertinence to the review is described. However, a literature review is written in essay form -- not as a list -- and the author is encouraged to compare the findings or relevance of different resources with each other in their paragraphs.