Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/PH9mPYC8RHs

 

Education Library Research Skills for the Capstone Part IV - Theories and theorists

 

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Narration:

>> Kim Burton: So now we're recording. Thank you, everyone, for coming again. My name's Kim Burton and I'm here with Anne Rojas. Anne and I are the Education Liaison Librarians. We liaise to the College of Education, which means we are your librarians. We are here to help you in all your research needs in the field of education.

This is the fourth session in our Education Research Skills for the Capstone, and tonight we will be talking about Theories and Theorists. How to discover theories, find the seminal research, and then locate examples of theories in dissertations and research articles.

 

We will start off at the Library website. Click on the blue Research by Subject button and then select education. This will bring you to the Education research page.

 

From the education research page, if you scroll down a little under research help, there is a drop-down menu for theories and theorists. And we can click on explore theories, and this brings us to the explore theories page. This talks about how to find the different theories in the field of education and helps find examples of them. Education always overflows into other subject related areas. Psychology, sociology, even business if your topic is about business or of menstruation, you might look at business theories. And you also want to thing basic.

 

Look at past references and resources that you have had. Textbooks for private courses. Course readings. This is called exploratory research. And we are going to go into this a little bit more, but that's how you're going to find information about theories. And what you find information about theories, you can look for more detailed information and then start looking for that seminal work.

 

Part of your research is going to include identifying entertaining original theoretical works and integrating them into your research to tie your ideas together and to them grounded. Now, foundational literature, also referred to as seminal research or classic research, is the original groundbreaking work on a theory in your area of study.

 

Many times, seminal work will be older than five years old and after -- it is actually published in a book so it is not peer-reviewed. But that's okay. If you are citing a theory, you want that seminal work even though it's older than five years and even if it is not peer-reviewed and it's in a book. Because you need to be citing the original works.

 

Now, we are going to talk a little bit about how to find more information about theories. As I mentioned before, looking in textbooks from your foundational courses, text books are great because they give you a lot of information, they give you a little information about a lot of topics. So you can go in there to read about some things you might have learned back in your foundational courses to get an idea of something that you might be interested in. And once you find one of those theories, you can go look in other reference sources for more information about that topic.

 

So for instance, let's say you work in your textbook. You see information about adult learning theory and you want to find more information. So a good way to do that would be to go to the library and see if you can find any scholarly books on this topic. Specifically books written by Malcolm Knowles, who is the theorist that came up with the theory.

 

To look at some books in the Walden library, we are going to go to the Walden website and we are going to click on the publications button the slow button here that says publications. And in the column on the left-hand side column we are going to click on the books button. And then in this search box here, this is the search box that will be searching books in the library. We are going to put in andragogy or adult learning.

 

And when I do this search, we are going to get -- it kicked me out.

 

So we get over 1000 items. But we are specifically looking for Malcolm Knowles’ work. So when the second search box, I'm going to type Knowles, Malcolm Knowles, that's the name, and in the select a field option, I can select other. So now it's going to be looking for andragogy or adult learning that is written by Knowles. And when I do this search Now, it's going to narrow down to three results. I will make my screen a little bit bigger.

 

So here we have Malcolm Knowles. He wrote this one, he wrote this second one, and you see down here, this is a different Knowles. So I won’t pay any attention to that third one.

 

So we have these two books that is a seminal work of Malcolm Knowles. But something you might notice is this was published in 2005. This book was published in 2005. Malcolm Knowles passed away in 1997. So how can there be books by him? And is this his seminal work?

 

This happens a lot, especially when you have theories that have been around for a while. This is actually a new edition. This is the sixth edition of Malcolm Knowles' book, The Adult Learner. And this is also a new edition of the book.

 

If I go to find at Walden, I can get more information about this book. For some reason this show more hasn't been working. But that's okay because I can just jump down to the preface and read this. And you can see and hear they are talking about Malcolm Knowles, this is the updated and revised sixth edition. And they are adding to his work.

 

So this is considered his seminal work because his work is here. That hasn't been changed. They have just added additional work by other researchers who are contrary thing to his foundational work. So this would be a seminal book that you could cite if you are interested in using this theory.

 

Are there any questions about looking at the book for a theorist?

 

>> No, I'm good.

 

>> Great. So I'm going to jump back to the education research page. I'm sorry, my computer is running a little bit slow tonight. And I'm going to go back to theories and get back to that education theory page. Which is linked in the slide deck that we shared with you.

 

Another great place to find information about theories is in our reference databases. And sage knowledge is a great database. It has a lot of reference items in it. And it will give you some short, concise information about what you're looking for -- in this case some theories. But it will also point you in a direction to see where the seminal works are. I am still going to search for TPACK or when I search for a theory or anything that has an acronym, I also want to type out that acronym. I can't type and talk at the same time, so I apologize. So TPACK or technological pedagogical content knowledge. When you have an acronym, you always want to type in the words after that. You want to form those in a phrase in that order. It's not going to find technological on one page and content knowledge on another. It's going to find all together like that.

 

So we hit certain see what we can find. And we get six results. And you can see right here that it's highlighted about TPACK in these resources. We are just going to go ahead and jump into this first one. And I can actually do a search. I will just search for the technological pedagogical content knowledge, and it brings it up. You can see it is citing Mishra and Kohler. So if I want to find more information and maybe find seminal work on this topic, I can search for both of these people in the reference list.

 

Scroll all the way down to the reference list. And here it is again. And this is the work that is cited. I'm going to find this article. Want to see what it has to say. There are a couple of ways that I can look for it. The easiest way is to copy the title and then we are going to go and look it up in Google Scholar.

 

However, I'm going to access Google Scholar through the Walden library. And when I do this, the Walden Library databases are going to be linked with Google Scholar. So if Google Scholar finds anything that Walden has, a find at Walden link will show up.

 

So you’re going to go to start your research at the top of the page and in this search by database box, I click on Google Scholar. And this is going to bring me to the Google Scholar search box that is linked with the Walden databases. I just type the article title in there, hit search, and it pulled up right away.

 

Now, it doesn't look like we have this article in the library because there is no find at Walden link over here. However, there is a PDF link. And this means that Google Scholar found this article online. I always like to open it up in a new tab. You see here is, the original work of Mishra and Kohler on this topic.

 

Another thing I could do here in Google Scholar is look at this cited by so Google Scholar has found almost a thousand researchers have who have cited this article Pearsall that tells me that this is probably a pretty influential piece of work in the field. This is probably the seminal work and what I should be citing, even though it's older than five years, I should still be citing it because it is talking about the seminal work of these two researchers.

 

So that is a quick way to get some ideas are different theories and theorists, going through textbooks, prior readings, the reference sources that we had at the library, and trying to track down those seminal works. Are there any questions so far? Anything I should show again?

 

>> Nope. Looks good.

 

>> Looks good.

 

Now, I want to take the next 15 minutes to go through some examples of how to find examples of theories in dissertations as well as articles. And I'm going to start by looking at some dissertations.

 

So those of you who were in the last session two weeks ago, we were talking about dissertations. So some of this we provided to you. To access dissertations, I click on the publications box from the Walden website. And then I click on the dissertations and theses tab on the left-hand side.

 

And then I can click on dissertations and theses at Walden University.

 

And am going to do two searches here. I'm going to search first find Ed.D. dissertation project study, and I'm going to do a Ph.D. education Ph.D. dissertation. So I'm going to start off by doing the Ed.D. search. This will be a refresher from two weeks ago. I type in Ed.D. and select the degree and then I put in my topic.

 

So let's say I do an early childhood education. I put the acronym for it and then I am going to type it out in quotation marks. I'm going to limit my date to the last two years. And I hit search.

 

So I get 62 results and I can go through here and pick one. I'm just going to go ahead and click on the second one. And to find out the theories, look at the framework this person is using, I can scroll down to the table of contents here we go. Table of contents. Theoretical foundation is on Page 12. So sometimes you can click on it. If that doesn't work, you have to manually scroll down to Page 12 in the dissertation. I went a little too far.

 

Okay. So they are using for their theoretical foundation, Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory of human development. So you can read this and see how they are using this, if it's something that you might be able to use for your research, and if so, you can also see that there are other researchers here. And these researchers are more recent. They are within the last five years.

 

So you have the seminal work, which goes back to 1979, and then what this researcher is doing, he or she are citing more recent work that is using Bronfenbrenner.

 

So you have the seminal work and you are reinforcing that seminal work by citing current research that is talking about Bronfenbrenner's theory or and using it in their own research.

 

So what we want to do is find the seminal work. And when you are dissertations, a lot of times the reference tab will be on the top. I just -- I can click on references. It automatically defaults to most recent first, but I can change this to author name click sort, and now it is listed by author name. I can just go down to the Bs. Here it is. Actually, we have two. We have this work that is in a handbook and then we have this book that he wrote.

 

So this is the one that we might want to look at. If we have a find at Walden here. It’s not there. I'm not surprised by that because it is an older book.

 

What you could do if this happens -- let me go back -- you can try looking this book up in a local library to see if they had it. Of course right now, most public libraries are closed. However, there could possibly be some academic libraries that are open. You would just have to check that out. Right Now, things are a little bit different. Hopefully, we will be able to find out later.

 

One way would be to use WorldCat. Worldcat.org is an online library that searches library catalogs around the world. What you can do is you can just take the title of a book, click on books, and this is not within the Walden library. This is completely different. WorldCat is a different website. Have nothing to do with the library.

 

But I put the title of that book in here and I click search books, and it finds the book right here. And what you can do is you can type in your ZIP Code and then click find libraries, and is going to find libraries in your ZIP Code that have this book.

 

What it also does is it tells you how far away it is, it gives you a map, but more importantly, it gives you the library information. So you can contact the library, you can call them, you can see if they are open, you can ask them if they have any resources -- academic library is to allow people to use their resources, but there may be restrictions. So that's a way to track down a seminal work if it is any book.

 

So I want to do another search just to see how to do this again. Go to advanced search, and this time we are going to search for a Ph.D. So we're doing a Ph.D. and we are changing the anywhere to degree. And we want to search the college of education, and we put department. That's as close as we can get to Ph.D. in the college of education. And let's put in here -- we are going to do some work on community colleges for the last 2 years. So here we have some results. Again I'm going to pop into this first one and we are going to go to the table of contents again.

 

Theoretical framework. This time we can just click on it.

 

So here they are using Banks’ transformative approach to online multicultural education as the theoretical framework. So what we can do again is go up to references.

 

Businesses by author name still and we are going to scroll down and look for Banks. There are a couple of Banks here. There is a Cherry Banks, and there is James Banks. James Banks again. I don't see the one that was cited from 2006, there's the one from 2006. There's another one. So James Banks is the clearest that we are using in this instance.

 

So what we can do is this is a book I can tell, because it has relevant chapters. You can search for this book in the Walden library as I showed you before. You can look for in WorldCat to see if it's there. Often we will find these find at Walden links in reference lists. You can click on that and open a new tab to see if it's available.

 

And it is. So this article right here from 2002, I can access in Taylor and Francis because we have that. And there is the article.

 

Were there any questions or anything I need to show again?

 

>> There is something that I'm hoping to find out. People have some questions in chat.

 

>> Oh, okay. I see. We were trying to put our questions and to the Q and A box because it's easier for us to answer. It's just Anne and I here.

 

>> There is a question on severing searches quantitative versus quantum qualitative.

 

>> Interesting. The next thing I was going to do is show how to look up theories and research articles and we will be able to demonstrate that. So I'm going to go back to the Walden library.

 

And okay. Again I'm going to go to the education research page, research by subject and education, and education resources, education source. This is my go to database. So we want to find an example of a theory and make it either qualitative or quantitative.

 

So what we can do is andragogy again. I like adult learner instead of adult learning. I'm going to change my selected field to abstract. So the database will bring back only resources or articles that have these terms in the abstract. Then in the second box I'm looking for a research article so there are a couple of things here. If I only want to look for qualitative, I can type qualitative in here. And I can change the select a field to subject. So that's going to look at a subject term. So is only going to bring up articles I have qualitative currently don't do that research, but qualitative as the subject term assigned to it. I'm going to uncheck full text. I want to review. I'm going to limit to date, just we don't get too many results back.

 

And we just got four. But they talk about andragogy or adult learner in the abstract. So that's what they are talking about. And they have qualitative research as a subject. So that means it is a qualitative research article. We can change this to quantitative. Subject. I will hit search. So none came up for that search. Maybe we can expand this by putting andragogy or adult learner anywhere in the article. And we get a couple more here. Quantitative research. Quantitative research. All the quantitative research is going to be the subject because that's what the article is. It looks like there is more for qualitative than quantitative.

 

But that's how you can search for specific types of research. You can also be a little bit more broad if you put in a different type. So if we did qualitative and we type or, it gives us some other terms we can add. So I like to do something like this. So qualitative or interview or case study. And so our focus group -- there are all types of qualitative research. So now is looking for any articles that has the subject term andragogy or adult learner in it. So now we have 56 results to go through.

 

So were there any questions?

 

>> We have a couple of questions that might be easier to answer after the recording is over.

 

>> We can stay late and answer questions for people.

 

So the slide deck. We went through the theories page, we also have a link to quick answers which is a great place to go to get quick answers to your questions, frequently asked questions. We link to the Ask a Librarian page. That's a fast way to get answers to your questions. We have reference library is available seven days a week. I also set up Capstone appointments for more in-depth research appointment. Either Anne or I can talk about your research for about 30 minutes in particular.

 

>> And just to acknowledge, we don't have any appointments in April. That's partly because of everybody being at home, and partly because of the fact that we have an intuitive going on right now. So you have to Ask a Librarian. The meantime, I am looking for May.

 

>> And that is filling up quickly.

 

So if the other questions are in-depth, we can stop the recording and answer some of those questions. Does that sound good?

 

>> Sure.

 

>> Okay. I will go up here and stop the recording.

 

>> One question was asking, she said she didn't follow the Ph.D. process. Can you show that again?

 

>> Absolutely. Let's go back to an advanced search for Ph.D. And I went over this in the dissertation session that we did two weeks ago. So you can also watch that recording. But if you're in teaching or education and you want to find other dissertations, in education, the first thing you can do is type in the Ph.D., and in the look for box we can type degree. Walden has Ph.D.s in many areas. Business, psychology, nursing. So we want to tell the database we only want Ph.D.s from the College of education. However, Walden does not catalog ProQuest dissertations. The ProQuest catalogs dissertations for thousands of universities.

 

They don't understand that Walden has a college of education. So the easiest way for us to find Ph.D.s in education is to in a second box -- box put in education and then change it to department. It's not perfect. You may miss some -- you might not catch all of them. But it does a pretty good job of narrowing down to just Ph.D.s in education. Then you can fill in any other topic. You can put in specific examples of a theory, or you can tighten something about if you are doing a quantitative or qualitative research, you can put that in there.

 

There are a lot of different ways to play around with it.

 

>> Okay. So somebody asked to go back to the beginning where we got to the education -- the education research page?

 

>> So from the Walden library, if you click on research by subject, you have a list of all the programs at Walden. We select education, and that brings you to the education research page, which I usually recommend that you bookmark, and from here we have a list of databases that we recommend. They are our best that's for doing research in the field of education.

 

Education sources a database that is provided to us by EBSCO. This is where I did the search for articles.

 

>> While we are in there, can we run one more for Skinner as the author, operant conditioning, maybe?

 

>> Sure. We can change Skinner and we want other personal so it's only going to bring up articles written by Skinner. And what?

 

>> Operant conditioning.

 

>> I will just copy it. Okay. And then we are going to uncheck -- we don't want peer-reviewed,

 

>> Do we want to check -- field?

 

>> Okay here we are one from 1986 and one from 1969.

 

>> So can we do the same thing from the book publications?

 

>> You. So if we go to the library website and then publications, books, we can click on books on the left-hand side and again we will do that operant conditioning, and we will get more here because this is searching articles and books. And now we will put Skinner in this is probably a better search. Change that to author and then click search.

 

So we have 12. We have some books in here. You can access them by clicking on the full text. And go through them.

 

>> I think that is everything.

 

>> If we did not get a chance, if we did miss your question, you can always go from the Walden library, this little bubble here, Ask a Librarian, email, put your question in here. As I said before, we have reference librarians that work seven days a week, not 24 hours a day, but they usually get back to you very quickly. So you can put your question in here, email it, and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.

 

>> The appointments are located from Ask a Librarian or the educational research page? Again, it will be in May, the first available spots. So --

 

>> So Ask a Librarian, the doctoral appointments, click on the college, and we continue to -- I mentioned April is all filled up. I just put my appointments in an hour ago. So I click on Anne, she has her appointments in there, too.

 

>> Okay. Next, Kim.

 

>> Thank you, everyone, for coming. I'm going to stop sharing. And like I said, if you have any other questions, please reach out to us through Ask a Librarian. You guys have a good day Thank you for coming.

 

 

 

End Transcript

 

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