Search 4: Proquest

Again, this new challenge for me to search in Proquest as I have never used it.  Proquest has some helpful tips about searching on their site which is useful. I click advanced search which allows me to enter in Boolean words. When you search for certain words it highlights the words that you are searching for which makes it easy to skim through to find articles that are relevant.

TOPICS	Boolean Operators	Results	Reflection
Guided Inquiry		10,520	As can be seen from the results this is far to Board so I need to narrow my search. However as I scroll down the page I notice a very reliable resource that could be useful, it’s the name of our readings book by Dr. Carol Kuhlthau. There seems to be a variety of reliable and relevant resources. To narrow my search down I am going to type in the following search to refine it to the Year level I am observing.
Guided Inquiry  Year 2	AND	5827	This has turned up a number of relevant results that I will look at later.  But there are far too many to search through so now I am going to make it even more narrowed down by adding in OR early childhood to see what this brings as Year 2 is found in Early childhood.
Guided Inquiry  Year 2 Early childhood	AND    OR	4023	Now this is rather annoying it has come up with other things that what I want it to search in. I assume it is because of the brackets and double brackets around the words. Nothing is really that relevant.
"Guided Inquiry"  "Year 2"  "Early childhood"	AND      OR	20	I have taken out all brackets when searching and now I am going to search using quotation marks the same words. This gives me more direct search and the database therefore searches for those exact words.  There are many relevant results that I will have a look through and see if any of them are relevant.
“Guided Inquiry”                “Science”                            “Primary”	AND      AND	161	Because my ILA is in Primary class and they are in the subject of Science I am going to add these words in. These seems to be some of this same results as a previous search that gave me 10,523 however not is culled it down to 178 results so not as many to search through. There seems to be a lot of relevant results here. So to refine my search I am going to add the following results.
“Guided Inquiry”                “Science”                            "Inquiry based learning" "Year 2"	And     AND      AND	0	This turned up 0 results. What am I going to do? I’m going to try searching for two topics.  However, when I didn’t have the quotation marks around any of these topics it found 4954. So when it has quotation marks around certain words rather than looking for each word separately it looks for the words as a phrase instead.
“Guided Inquiry”                “Primary School”	AND      AND	1	I have now added “Primary Schools” to see what kind of results this  brings us and it has brought us a lot of relevant information relating both Primary schools and Guided inquiry .
"Guided Inquiry"  "Year 2"	AND	3	One of these seems to be relevant however, it still does not mention year 2.

My next search for in Proquest will attempt to find some more information on Information Literacy in Year 2. 

Topics	Boolean Operators	Results	Reflection
Information Literacy		44,971	There might be a great number of results however none seem to really help me with what I am searching for. So I will attempt to now put quotation marks around these words to see if this gives us a more precise result.
“Information Literacy”		3870	Looking at some of the results I believe its still to broad and so to bring and narrow it down more to primary schools I will now search
"Information Literacy" "Year 2" "Grade 2"	AND          OR	3148	To see if there are anything about Information Literacy and Year 2. Nothing looks relevant here. So I’m going to make it broader by adding in Primary schools as year 2 is found here
“Information Literacy”      “Early Childhood”	AND	188	Because Year 2 is found in Early Childhood I have decided to search for that.  Which has lead me to a number of useful resources that I will look at later.
"Information Literacy" "Primary schools"	AND	53	I am also going to try Primary schools as Year 2 are found in this section of schooling. This looks promising.  There are heaps of fantastic results here that I can use. I still want to see if there are any that relate to my year level.

Failed Search:

Reflection on failed attempt:

I believe this attempt failed because it was too specific a search.  Therefore there were too many quotation marks around too many words and there were no sources that had all of those words in it.  As Proquest looks for all of the words entered they may not have found an article that contained all of the words entered as when you put quotation marks around words it doesn't find each word separately but finds them as phrases instead. I used AND Boolean to narrow the search down however, it seems to have narrowed the search to to nothing. By only having quotation marks around certain words that I want the results to show it opens up more possibilities and therefore widening the search.  This is why for the search after that I took out all of the quotation marks out so it would search for all of the words. Which lead me to 4954 results as it looked up each word separately.

Reflecting on using Proquest Database:

Reflecting on my searching in Proquest although it has been useful searching tool in some areas, I did not find it helpful when it came to searching for my specific Grade/Year level for my information learning activity.  It basically turned up nothing under the topics of Guided Inquiry AND Year 2/Grade 2 and Information Literacy AND Year 2/Grade 2 this was rather disappointing.  I am going to have to find another database that can hopefully find information relating to this.

My feelings by the end of using Proquest database: I could feel the storm clouds slowly take me over, I was sinking in and endless wall of water with so much information to search through and two more searches to go through.  I was sinking with not finding much information on year 2.