SPCE 691: Supervising Human Service Staff in ABA

You need to find research discussing the different instruction methods you may use in training direct care staff, looking for the strengths and limitations of each method.

This page will cover researching the use of personalized system of instruction (or psi).

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.

If we want to focus on how effective a personalized system of instruction is for training, our search might look like this:

We get a lot of results.  Then, remember that we want to examine the records that we find, looking for other possible terms or phrases that might improve our search.

Here's the very first record that pops up:

"Instructional Effectiveness" is a great phrase -- we should use it.  But "Individualized Instruction" is a broader terms than "Personalized System of Instruction" so we probably don't want to use that, since we already found so many records.

Here's how we could revise our search:

This cuts our results down by quite a few.

Now we should think about how we can limit our results further, because these are still fairly general results.

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.