A+ Education Database
The context for my school's Information Learning Activity is set in an Early Childhood classroom, a Year 2 class who is studying Science. Their form of Inquiry is predominately based on Guided Inquiry where the teacher has put them in pairs and given them a piece of paper. One of the group acts as a Zoologist and the other is a Vet and they are asked to answer questions they have already been given by the teacher and find out information on an animal.
I am finding A+ Education is a great search engine to use as it highlights in red the words being search which makes it easier to find the appropriate documents to use. I can then disregard the documents that don’t contain any of the words I am searching for or that don’t relate to the topics I am wanting
Boolean Operators | Results | Reflection |
Information Literacy | 1278 | I decided to start with Information literacy as these are the skills that you need to inquire about topics. This search is too broad as it is looking up both words individually and not treating them as one phrase. I am going to narrow my search by adding more topics to search for however on a quick glance there appears to be one that may be of use. I also tried using “Information literacy” however having quotation marks around the words does not seem to make a difference in A+ Education. This is too broad so I’m refining it to them to reduce and hopefully eliminate the non relevant resources. |
Information Literacy AND Primary | 316 | I am going to add in PRIMARY, as Year 2 is in Primary school. There are a number of articles which relates and discuss the use of Information as a model in primary schools. There is also an article from Dr. Michael Eisnberg who is a theorist and developed the Big 6 skills. As 316 is still a lot of resources to scroll through I will refine it by adding keywords I have noticed in the some of the articles. |
Information Literacy AND Year 2 OR Early Years AND Inquiry AND | 7 | I am now taking PRIMARY out of the search as that is too broad a field and adding in YEAR 2 as my ILA is based on a Year 2 class and putting in Boolean word OR so it searches words other than Year 2 and looks for EARLY YEARS. I will also add in INQUIRY as this is what they are using for their model and SCIENCE which is what their activity subject they doing is under. There are a number of relevant sources that talk about how inquiry relates to the Science and curriculum. |
Information Literacy AND Early Years | 3 | I am now going to add EARLY YEARS as Year 2 comes under early years in education. One of these results looks promising as it talks about the impact that Information Literacy has on Prep to Year 4 students and refers to teaching Information Literacy in the early years. |
Information Literacy AND Year 2 | 1 | To be more specific I am now going to try searching for and adding year 2 which came up with an article about how students skills generally increase in year 2 when Information Literacy is taught. I feel that this might be a very useful resource to use in my context. |
Next I am going to search for Inquiry based learning as this, I believe, flows on from Information Literacy. Once you have skills to seek and analyse information you can then use these to inquire about certain topics.
Boolean Operators | Results | Reflection |
Inquiry Based Learning AND Early Childhood OR Elementary OR Primary OR Year 2 | 38901 | Now I am going to search for some equivalent names for Year 2 such as Early childhood and another name for EARLY CHILDHOOD in America is ELEMENTARY. This gave me a number of relevant sources to think about using. However, it is far too broad as well so I thought I might need to narrow my search down to give me more definant sources. As I scrolled down the pages I noticed one word popping out Primary so I decided to search for INQUIRY BASED LEARNING AND PRIMARY OR ELEMENTARY to broaden my search. |
Inquiry Based Learning AND Primary OR Elementary | 1163 | Most of these were relevant to what I was looking for so I now I will sift through them in more detail and see which are more suitable. I found that this is still rather broad so I will now limit my search results I am now going to search for INQUIRY BASED LEARNING. |
Inquiry based learning | 133 | It has narrowed it down quite a bit. There are a number of good resources to look at that I might be able to use. Again this was too broad a topic search so I then needed to narrow it down even further. |
Inquiry based learning AND Science | 36 | Wow that has really narrowed it down. I’m looking for results that have both the words INQUIRY BASED LEARNING and SCIENCE in them. I didn’t find any that related to both and that were in the year level that I am looking at. My next step would be then to add YEAR 2. |
Inquiry Based Learning AND Science AND Year 2 | 0 | This gave me no results. So I am now going to add OR ELEMENTARY OR EARLY YEARS to broaden it to look for those words. |
Inquiry based learning AND Science AND Elementary OR Early Years | 2257 | Well this certainly gave me more results. In the first 30 results not one of them had the words Inquiry AND Elementary or Early years in the one article. Because of this I have decided to just search for Elementary which gave me 1 result. To narrow the search I decided to search Elementary and early years separately and to get more specific results about what I was searching for. |
Inquiry based learning AND Science AND Elementary | 1 | Which gave me one result which discussed exploring the development of fifth graders. This is not applicable to my research as I am looking at Year 2. |
Inquiry based learning AND Science AND Early Years | 0 | This resulted in no results, so i decided to search add in Primary. |
Inquiry based learning AND Science AND Primary | 11 | This narrowed my search down which is good. I took out Elementary and early years as they did not seem to find |
Final search looked like:
Kuhlthau Information Search Process said in my exploration stage I should have feelings of "Confusion, frustration and doubt"(Kuhlthau, 2007). After my first successful search in the Exploration stage I had feelings of:
Bibliography
Kuthlthau, Carol. (2007). Guided Inquiry: Learning in te 21st Century. Libraries Unlimited. United States of America.
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