Overview

All curriculum development work, educational research and almost every educational or training and planning event should begin by learning from the prior experience of other educators. This requires a search of the professional literature. The best way to manage this is to search the world's finest database, one that is maintained by the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC). This document teaches a strategic approach to search activity and teaches a more advanced presentation format that makes your bibliography much more valuable for your research needs or those of a committee or team.  That is, this advanced format adds the descriptors and the abstract to the standard citation data. You will choose articles for further reading based on your findings.

The basic principles of the project could apply to any search of citation databases. Because of ERIC, education has the world's best organized and managed database of educational scholarship.  The database is a citation structured database to the educational literature, a database that was begun in 1966, though it also references important works published prior to that date.  The ERIC literature consists of the articles and documents cited in the database.  This work was once done by some 16 ERIC clearinghouses and 10 adjunct clearinghouses (e.g., organizations of reviewers) who made decisions about the value of works and entered the data on those important enough to store as references in the ERIC database. The clearinghouses functioned up through December, 2003 when the ERIC clearinghouses were disbanded and reorganized as a single unit. A new centralized model for acquiring information for this database appeared as of October 1, 2004. Further, the ERIC Document Delivery Service no longer exists as these documents are now online from 1993 to the present with effort underway to finish adding the older material for which copyright clearance can be obtained by March, 2009 (EUIE, 2007). In order to focus on the literature database, other more heavily used ERIC clearinghouse services were dropped (Rudner, 2003), with some services picked up by other institutions such as the Educator's Reference Desk, which provided answers to frequent questions, lesson plans and more.

In short, one effective strategy for searching the educational literature for prior scholarship is to search the ERIC database for articles and documents, create a specialized bibliography of what you find using citation management software (e.g. RefWorks), and then read and report on some of the articles in this set. For the particular requirements of this course, the bibliography should be accompanied by a two lists of  descriptors (keywords) from the ERIC thesaurus. One set of descriptors should be in the content area that is part of your professional interests as a student and the other set note the course related descriptors and concepts. The searches must be done using at least one descriptor from each list. Do use this project as an opportunity determine search terms and topics that will be of relevance throughout your educational career. Years from now, the same search terms will be still be relevant for retrieving the most current articles on the selected topics of interest. Finally, a short paper is to be created using the Write-n-Cite feature of the online RefWorks application.

You must save the results of this search and finally publish the thesaurus terms, bibliography and article reviews as a web page or web pages. Note that in this work you are not making a printout of citations and then manually typing it back in for editing. That concept should be put to rest permanently. Part of your task is to figure out how to efficiently handle the copy and paste commands, moving the information from the computer network system to your computer workstation. 

Outline of the Five Stages

Stage two, requires the use an online version of the ERIC database which can be searched from a campus Library or from anywhere on the Internet. The search terms compiled in stage one are to be used to search for relevant topics leading to saving search strategies and citation data to your disk. As a part of this search it is a requirement to identify a set of articles to find, read and write about. If you work in the library, the staff at the Hunter Library reference desk is close-at-hand if there are questions. If you work at home, you may call or send email questions to Hunter Library staff or if in Asheville, stop by and talk with the UNCA library staff. 

By mid-semester, begin work on the final three stages. In stage three you will bring this data file into a word processor or web editor of your choice, putting the citation data in APA format, including the descriptor and abstract information for each citation. To automate the tedious process of citation formatting, use the online RefWorks system, including its excellent tutorial, provided for free by Hunter Library with question support by library staff. The RefWorks system is provided free to all students but other citation management systems could be used in its place such as ProCite or EndNote. Once the bibliography is completed use the Save As Web Page command in Word to turn the bibliography into a web page that must next be uploaded to your web site and linked from a web page. When done you will have a highly annotated bibliography, with both ERIC and the computer playing a significant role in its creation and online publication. In the fourth stage create an abbreviated essay using Write-n-Cite which responds to three of the articles in your bibliography and include stage five, a reflection on the experience of this project.

Stage One - Preparing to Hunt

The search terms needed for the hunt are found in the ERIC Thesaurus. Though this thesaurus is a book available near the Reference Desk at the library, the ERIC Thesaurus is also available online.  It is very helpful to interact with the Library reference staff to learn how to use the ERIC Thesaurus wisely. Where possible, become familiar with the paper (book) version of the thesaurus. The online approach to the thesaurus is described below.
 

1. Click the Thesaurus tab to see the thesaurus search area. 2. Note the that the input search box for searching the thesaurus is below the input search box for searching the citation database. Click this image to see a much larger version of this screen.

ERIC is a controlled vocabulary database. Teams of lexicographers built, use and continue to enhance a set of terms which are then applied to describe each of the approximately 1,000 articles added a week (EUIE, 2007). Consequently, using these descriptors is deemed more effective than just making up search terms of personal interest as one would in searching Google. This activity requires that the controlled terms (descriptors) come from the ERIC Thesaurus. Searching for Thesaurus terms produces lists of descriptors, related words and phrases. Each term is also linked to its definition and to other related terms. Copy descriptors useful for this project and save them. This system does not prevent other search terms from being used. Another strategy is to use the ERIC keyword search for any term that comes to mind and then look at the descriptors for that article to determine the best descriptors to use in finding other similar documents.

Create two columns of these descriptor search terms that are drawn from the ERIC Thesaurus. One column lists course computer-related terms. The second column lists terms important to you professionally.  See the table below for examples.