Search 5: Google Scholar

This is a database which I have never used previously.  Before I began searching, I went into our University Blackboard site and then into our Learning Resources and down to resources which our fantastic Lecturer had put up to help us in our searching efforts. There I found the YouTube clip that was made by our Lecturer to assist us in our searching of Google Scholar. It gave me ideas on the best ways of using a search engine.  Below are some of the searching methods I used and the searches I did in this database.

Topic	Boolean Operator	Result	Conclusion
Inquiry Based Learning		1,320,000	This is too many results to sift and scroll through so I am now going to add in quotation marks to make it a narrower search so that instead of looking up all three words, it now sees them as one phrase.
"Inquiry-based" Learning		33,000	Let’s now look at “Inquiry-based” as a direct phrase which brings the result down considerably. There are many great relevant results however to make it more specifically looking for school, I am going to add in "Primary-school. THis will hopefully narrow my search and look for more specific articles.
"Inquiry-based" Learning Primary- School	AND	3,010	However, with Google you don’t need the word AND  so I will type in brackets (Primary School). This is still far too broad, so I am now going to add more words (Year2 OR Primary OR Elementary OR Early Childhood)
"Inquiry-based" Learning Year 2 Primary-school Elementary Early Childhood	AND OR OR OR	11, 300	This is looking much better.  Let’s just see if  there is any relevant information here. There is information that talks about hands on activities in elementary, how to implement inquiry into primary schools.
"Inquiry-based" Learning Year 2 Primary School Elementary Early Childhood Science	AND OR OR OR AND	10,200	I am slowly narrowing my search. There is a lot of relevant information that I will be looking at later in this area. There are a number that relate to Science and Inquiry in primary schools.
“Guided Inquiry” Year 2 Primary Elementary Early Childhood Science	AND OR OR OR AND	1190	Now to make my search even narrower and to hopefully get more relevant information on my topics, I am going to search for “Guided Inquiry” as this is the model of inquiry my Year 2 class is looking at. I am also keeping Science there because this is the subject they are doing the project on.  Not too bad a result. There are a number of articles that discuss discovering Guided Inquiry methodology in Early childhood.

What I have learnt from using Google Scholar?

In Google Scholar I learn how to link our universities database to Google Scholars. This gave me opportunities to search current databases and also helped me decide which sources are the most reliable and which are recommended by my University.

I also learnt to ascertain how many people had cited articles that I was thinking of using. This allowed me to see whether the articles came from reliable sources as it gave the number of people who had cited the article and who they were.  If it was a name that I was familiar with or that I had heard about, I would say that it was a reliable resource to use.   It also allowed me to trace the beginning of the articles.  Google scholar also allowed me to view related articles.