SPCE 691: Supervising Human Service Staff in ABA

This page will cover researching the use of the effectiveness of modeling for the purpose of teaching a 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.  Try both!

ERIC seems (again) like a good database to start with, since its focus is on education.

We've noticed from searching on our other topics that the phrase "instructional effectiveness" is a good one to use.  If we want to focus on how effective modeling is as a means of instruction, our search might look like this.

When we examine our results, it's clear that other uses of the word "modeling" are throwing our results off.  Many titles have to do with the scientific use of models in analyzing data.

When this happens to me, I use the Thesaurus feature to look up my term.  The Thesaurus link is in the upper-left hand corner in ERIC.  (Consult: Use a database Thesaurus.)

After clicking on the "Thesaurus" link, you'll see a new screen, with a new search box.  We can type modeling there, and press "Browse" to look through the alphabetical list of preferred subject headings.

In the list shown above, we see that for the term "Modeling" it says we should use "Modeling (Psychology)," which falls next in the list alphabetically.  Clearly this term will draw the distinction between mathematical modeling and the modeling we're interested in.

When we click on "Modeling (Psychology)," we'll see this, showing broader, narrower, and related terms, as well as a "Scope Note" which describes how ERIC defines their use of the term "Modeling (Psychology)":

If I want to explore any of the terms listed (to read their Scope Note, for example), I can click on the blue link.

Regarding the use of modeling as a means of instruction, the two terms that stand out to me are the main one of "Modeling (Psychology)" and the related term "Observational Learning."

To ask ERIC to search for records which have either of these terms in the subject/descriptor field:

1. Click the box next to each term of interest
2. Click the "Add" button towards the top to add the terms to the search box, with the word OR in between.

You'll see the terms show up at the search box at the top of the screen, like this:

When you click Search, you'll see we get many, many results.  But we can add "instructional effectiveness" in another box to narrow it down.

The results of this search seem much more on-target.

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 left-hand side under "Refine Results."  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 by either clicking on the PDF or HTML full text link, or  by clicking on. 

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