SPCE 691: Supervising Human Service Staff in ABA

In case you need to find research discussing the different instruction methods you may use in training direct care staff, this page will cover researching the effectiveness of coaching and/or performance feedback for the purpose of teaching a skill and monitoring implementation of the skill.

For this topic, ERIC (with its education focus) will be your best choice.  However, examining the psychology behind these training methods, by using PsycINFO is not a bad idea, either.

Once you've chosen your database, you'll need to consider the search terms to use as you search.

I recommend the CHOP, DROP, and OR technique.  (This example walks you through it.)

So we'll start by CHOPping our topic up, identifying the important components. 

If we're looking at the use of coaching or performance feedback to teach skills, here's what we might start with:

• coaching
• skills

Next, we'll DROP each of those terms into a search box on an advanced search screen.  Here's what that would look like in ERIC (EBSCOhost).

And then we'll consider whether there are synonyms or related terms for any of our search terms that we also want to search on, and use OR to include those in the search.  Since we know "performance feedback" is another term related to coaching, we could include that.  (Wondering why I'm putting double quotes around some terms?)

When we hit "Search" we get a large number of 'hits.'  Let's look at our results, remembering that focusing on the Subjects field is a good way to find good search terms.

In the first record (shown above), we see lots of terms in the Subjects field, and two stand out as useful: "Coaching (Performance)," and "Skill Development."  If I like, I could investigate the phrase "Feedback (Response)," by using the Thesaurus.  But at first glance, "Coaching (Performance)" seems a better term to describe what we're going for. 

Here's what our new search looks like:

We have a more reasonable number of records to deal with now.

At this point, we could consider ways to narrow our search.

ONE way we could limit our search would be to add another term in the third box.  Then the database will go through the records we've found and look for any that have our additional term in them. 

Remember that you are asked to "Identify articles that most closely reflect your target population and knowledge/skills you seek to develop."

We might, for example, add some terms to the third search box, describing either our target population or the skills our training will focus on.

ANOTHER way we could limit our search would be to look at the limiters on the results page just under the search box.  There are options to limit by date or by the type of source (article, book, etc.).

The list of source types will vary, based on the database you're using.  ERIC includes a variety of sources.  For the type of research we need to do, limiting to Academic Journals is a good idea.

Once you've chosen an article based on its record in the database you're searching, bring up the full text of the article by using the "Access now" or "Access options" buttons, or by looking for the "Find It @ Ball State" button, depending on the database.

For more information, check out the information at Find the Full Text of an Article and/or Interlibrary Loan.