What you need to do...
This page will cover researching the use of PowerPoint or other visual supports in instruction.
Choose your database
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 (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new window
ERIC EBSCOhost is a key database in the field of education, providing access to bibliographic records of journal and non-journal literature. About one third of the content is accessible in full text from within the database.
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new window
Key database in the field of psychology. Includes information of use to psychologists, students, and professionals in related fields such as psychiatry, management, business, and education, social science, neuroscience, law, medicine, and social work.
Choose your search terms
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. Here's what we might start with:
- instruction
- PowerPoint
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. Because we can consider other visuals besides PowerPoint, we can add that term, and how about using teaching as a related term for instruction.
When we hit "Search" we get a huge number...because this is an education database! 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 jump out at me: "Visual Aids," and "Instructional Effectiveness." In fact, I think I want to edit my search, and get rid of the term "teaching" and just use "Instructional Effectiveness" because of how well it captures what we want to find. And instead of searching on "visuals," I'm going to use the phrase "Visual Aids." (Wondering why I'm putting double quotes around some terms?) 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.
Place limits on your search...when necessary
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 your article
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.