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.

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.



Search 2 and 3: ERIC and EBL

ERIC Database: 

My Feelings at this stage:

I entered into another new and exciting database that was going to give me some great resources for my assignment. Very enthusiastically I started to search into the search query Guided inquiry. Thankfully they make the words that I am searching for bold which I find makes it easier to see if the documents relate to what I’m searching for or not. Therefore if it did not contain the words that I searched for I disregarded those as they appeard not to be related to my topics.

Topics	Boolean Operators	Results	Reflection
Guided Inquiry		296	I was impressed with my first search as it had many fantastic resources that could be used in my Context. As I sifted through the many articles I decided  it might be a good idea to change my search to narrow it down and to add in YEAR 2, EARLY YEARS, EARLY CHILDHODD, SCIENCE and ELEMENTARY because my Class that I’ve been observing is Year 2 which is found in Early childhood/Elementary and their KLA is Science.
Guided Inquiry Year 2 Elementary Early Childhood Science	AND OR OR AND	327537	Well this definitely gave me way too many results to sift through. Now I am going to take out Elementary OR Early Childhood as this makes it broader and narrow it down to Year 2 AND Science. This will also help me have more specific results in the areas that I am interested in.
Guided Inquiry Year 2 Science	AND AND	3	Wow that’s much better. This gave me two relevant reports to look at closer and decide if I should include them. These more talked about Science and Inquiry rather than Guided Inquiry. But its still relevant for my search.
Guided Inquiry Year 2	AND	5	I might try and see if there are more results that include Inquiry AND Year 2.  None of these results were relevant as they were either talking about Year 1 or university or high school students.
Inquiry Based Learning Year 2	AND	164	I changed my search to Inquiry AND Year 2 as I was not finding much on Guided Inquiry and year 2. This came up with a number of useful resources and yet again gave me hope that there was information out there.
Inquiry Based Learning Year 2 Science	AND AND	44	Adding Science to the search bar gave me 44 results a more manageable attempt to sort through. There were some very interesting results and some I will think about using.

My final search for this database which gave me 44 search results to go through:

Search No2.

EBL Database

Topics	Boolean Operators	Results	Reflection
Guided Inquiry		1726	Well although there were a lot of results there were not talking about Guided inquiry. It is too broad so I will have to narrow it down further.
Guided Inquiry               Primary	AND	4973	Again not really anything relevant to Guided Inquiry.
Inquiry Based Learning		6103	There were a number of relevant resources in this search. There was one called “Collaborating for Inquiry-Based Learning: School Librarians and Teachers Partner for Student Achievement”. Again there were too many resources to go through. I tried narrowing this to INQUIRY BASED LEARNING and PRIMARY however this turned up nothing much at all that was relevant, either. So now I am changing my results to another search.
Information Literacy		4293	Well with this subject search I was nicely surprise to find all the fantastic resources that this found.

Overall I was rather disappointed with the EBL database.  I believe the EBL website is more suited to looking up Ebooks that you know the names of and definitely for searching Information Literacy. It did not appear to have any results on Guided Inquiry and I am not sure of how I could have searched that to make the results more relevant than putting around quotation marks around the words that I did. At the end of this searching database I was beginning to feel a bit: