Skip to Main Content

EDPS 260: Human Growth and Development for Elementary Education

This guide will help you find relevant empirical peer-reviewed articles for your research assignment in EDPS 260.

Break your topic into keywords

As you begin your search, you will need to find keywords to represent your case study topic. Let's try an example: 

Topic: Explore parents' knowledge about nutrition on the behavior and development of children

Choose the important concepts to use as keywords.

Explore parents' knowledge about nutrition on the behavior and development of children

Try a search with these simplified keywords. 

Choose one of the databases from Step 1 - in this example, let's use PsycINFO. 

Here is our initial search:

Screenshot of search terms in PsycINFO search boxes

Improve your search

After your initial search, take a look at the results. Do any interest you? One technique is to use a good search result to improve your search. For example, here is a result from our original search:

Screenshot of article result showing Subject terms 

Take a look at the Subjects. These are terms the database uses to categorize articles, so they are often helpful search terms. Right away, you may notice a few things:

  • The database uses the term Parental Attitudes
  • There are a few synonyms we may want to try for 'nutrition,' including Eating Behavior and Food Intake
  • In other article results, the term 'childhood development' is used as a Subject

With this in mind, we can improve the search, adding synonyms from other article results and our own brainstorming. 

Screenshot showing search boxes with the terms parent or parental or parents; AND knowledge or attitudes; AND childhood development; AND nutrition or food intake or eating

Search tips:

  • Separate synonyms or alternate forms of the keyword with 'or.' This guides the databases search to locate articles with either term included.
  • Try several searches before you are satisfied with your results
  • Use your results to improve your search terms
  • Exact terms such as the names of developmental theories often make good search terms
    • If you use the name of a theory or technique in your search, try adding quotation marks around it. For example, "attachment theory." This will make the database search for it as an exact phrase. 

Advanced research methods

 

Screenshot of article result showing cited references and times cited

When you take a look at this article result, you'll notice that there are two links at the bottom: Cited References: (54) and Times Cited in this Database: (7).

  • Cited References will take you to a list of the articles or other sources that are cited in this article 
  • Times Cited will take you to a list of articles that are included in the database PsycINFO and have cited this article. This is a great tool for discovering more recent articles that are related to your topic. It's also helpful because an article that has been cited many times is likely an important one in the study of your particular topic.