Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/AljTEg91_Z0 

 

Introduction to Education Research

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>>        ANNE ROJAS: 

to Introduction to Education Research.  My name is Anne Rojas, and I'm with Kim Burton.  And we are just here to show you tonight about our online library, how it works and to use the resources and find the resources that we have.

 

The Internet is a beautiful thing but finding what you need can be problematic when there's too much information.  Too much information makes it harder to figure out what is going to work for you and we are here to help you find the right information for your coursework.  Spending time up front and familiarizing yourself with the library resources and how to use them will save you a lot of time down the road.  Tonight we will cover the basics of navigating the online library, where to find the best resources for your coursework, and how to put together an effective search.

 

We will also talk about accessing full text and how to get help.

 

Some of the information on the open web is useful.  There's a lot of good information on government websites, those are reliable, there's also Google Scholar, which is a great tool.  But your main source for coursework will be current journal articles; books take a long time to publish and reuse those mostly for background information.   We have books in the library and I will show you where to go for those but the main focus in the session tonight will be on how to find journal articles.

 

You can use those for your assignments and to back up your discussion posts.  We will talk about how to find them and how to search efficiently for them.  When you look for education issues for your discussion posts and assignments are primary source will be those journal articles.

 

We encourage people to bookmark the library homepage.  You can get there through the portal or the classroom, Blackboard classroom.  You do not have to.  You can type in the URL library.waldenu.edu.

 

What can you access from the library homepage?  The most popular page is the course guides page, so if you look for the big blue button where it says, course guides, and click on that.  That will take you to the readings that you have that are marked as "available" in the library.  So any required readings that are marked as available in the Walden University library you will be able to find in your course guide.  We link them by course code, that is alphanumeric so if we go to E for education pages, and just look at one as an example -- if we go to the foundations of early childhood studies, you can see here your required course readings are listed and hotlinked out.  They come from different library databases.

 

So they will have a different look to them.

 

You can see this one is available in one of the ProQuest databases, you can download the PDF here.  Other ones will look just a little bit different, depending on where they are coming from in our collections.  And we will go there to see -- the layout is different but you can have HTML or full text PDF there.  We also have available on some of the course guides is help with your discussions and assignments.  And some of them also have writing center resources.

 

So you can go to any of these pages to get help with anything we have found has been library intensive.  And so we put out some help for you as far as how to go in and search what we have available in the library, some recommendations of where to search.

 

As I said, that is our most popular page for people just starting with Walden, for how to find your required course readings, they are available in the library.  We have an alphabetical list also of our databases and you can look for journals by name and search for books here as well.

 

If you have a specific article you are looking for, we have article search available and dissertations.  And then you can always go to more resources.  From any of our library pages you will also have these tabs across the top, ask a librarian in the upper right-hand corner always.  But you can go here to start your research, we will look there in a bit as well as getting help and other services.  And you can find out about your friendly librarians here on the homepage as well.

 

So hopefully, that will give you the quick lowdown on what the layout is.  We do have this Google style search box on the library.  This is searching our search tool, Thoreau, which looks at over half the collection here at the library. a lot of people get frustrated with this because it looks like a Google style search box but it does not work the same as Google so if I put in my entire search query and the search box and click on, search, it will tell me that there are no results.

 

That is just because the library databases do not whole sentences for questions.  The library databases like just keywords.  If instead of surfing, what is leadership doing about discipline in high school I looked at high school discipline and leadership -- I can pull that up and I get 74 results.

 

That will give us a start for how to find resources from that main search box on the homepage.

 

There is also a radio button here for searching everything.  This search is not just for the databases for articles and books but it searches the library website.  The quick answers, which is answers to frequently asked questions -- you have a question about something like peer review if your professor is talking a lot about peer review and you are not sure what is happening with that, you can search for peer review, searching "everything", and on the left-hand column it will give information that we have available on our website about verifying peer review, evaluating resources, and different places we talk about peer review on the library website.

 

In the middle column, it will give you results from quick answers, which is answers to secretly asked questions.  Here, you can find answers to questions like, what is peer review? How do I find an article?  How do I know my article is peer-reviewed?  And so you can click on any of those to get an answer to your question. 

 

Over on the right-hand side is your results list from Thoreau, which is the search tool that we have linked from the main page.  This will give you links to articles and books available and related to peer review.

 

That is from the library homepage, you can search Thoreau, it will default, it is searching broadly so you will get a lot of results.  Some may be related to ice pack more to education than others.  And then you have the option to search everything, our website as well.

 

We often recommend you go to select a subject and click on the education link to take you to resources specifically selected for education students.  And so you can bookmark this page as well, anything you need to get to you can get to from here.

 

We have a Google-style search box here as well and we will do a search there in just a moment, but to let you know the layout of this, you can go to education databases, find education journals and books in the middle section.  And underneath you can get research help.  For different aspects of your research what I would recommend is even if you forget everything we talk about tonight, you can go to the education resource basics and it will give you a quick video and it will give you links to help you get started searching.

 

We have links to quick answers here and ask a librarian, and doctoral students can make appointments with us as well.

 

Again, this search box works the same way that the other one does -- if you put in a full sentence, you'll probably not get many results, if any.  On our page, we do have a test run on a little video that tells you how it works.  So, again, you can get a quick answer to how that works.  So, instead of searching common core policy and elementary schools, you would want to break it down and say, common core AND policy AND elementary.  And you can search it that way to start to get some results -- instead of zero it gives you over 750 results.

 

It is casting a pretty wide net.  But this search box, instead of searching over half the collection, it is actually just searching a curated list of databases that Kim and I have selected better education and education -related.

 

So far finding an article or resource available on something to just backup your discussion post on a weekly discussion or if you need to find one or three articles on a topic, that can be a really easy way to search.  Just remember to put in your main concepts and not a whole sentence.

 

If we go to education databases to do what I like to call eight more precision search, you can see you get a list of specific databases.  And this defaults to the graduate list.  But you can also go to an undergraduate list for recommendations.

 

This will give you links to what we would recommend to get started as an undergraduate education student.

 

What we will do now is go into education source.  This is a broad collection, and so we find it is an easy place to get started.

 

If we look -- we have three search boxes instead of just the one.  And this is what I mean by doing a little more precision searching.  If we do that original search we did with high school AND leadership AND discipline , we can put all of those in and underneath, you can see full text is already checked, so that is handy, everything we find will be available in full text.

 

If your instructor is asking you to look for peer-reviewed resources, you can check that as well.  And then you can also limit the dates.  Sometimes for those weekly discussion posts, they will want you to look at things just from the last few years.

 

So if we search that, you can see that we get 24 results, which seems sort of odd because we know there is quite a bit more on that.  But what we can do, because we have three search boxes, instead of just the one -- we can start to put in some synonyms for our different concepts.

 

What I like to do is think of it as putting in just one concept per line.  And separating out synonyms with the word OR within your boxes.  You can do high school OR secondary and search that. or you can look at leadership OR principles.  Or you can look at administrators too. If her graph I will just mention that  you can actually save yourself some typing by using an "*" For words that vary at the end.  So leader* will pick up leadership, leaders. administrat* will get administrators administration, etc.

 

If we use the *, it will give us over 300 results instead of 24.  It makes a really big difference.

 

Okay, I think I will pop back quickly to the PowerPoint.  Are there any questions so far?

 

>>         KIM BURTON:  No not so far, we have been able to answer the ones that have come through.

 

>>        ANNE ROJAS:  Okay, I will just pop into the PowerPoint then.  You can see that the library homepage and the education research page, the links are available here in the PowerPoint.  So if you download that you will have those.  Just remember the advantages to using the library is that you do end up with credible sources without a doubt, as opposed to googling things.  You have peer review limiters, full text is available.  There are some tools that provide APA help as well, which I will mention in a moment.

 

In general, how I like to put it is that less is more.  Because going through 100 or even 300 results in a library database is much easier than trying to figure out what is going to work from a Google or Google Scholar search.

 

Really, the only thing you have to remember is that keywords are the important thing, you want to look for the main concepts, making sure you are pulling out what is most important.  And think about synonyms, because a lot of us get stuck in our own turn of phrase and it might turn out that additional vocabularies being used out there that you were not thinking of.  And you can add those things in as you find them along the way.

 

You can do that by looking at the subject lines and in the abstracts as well.  So choosing the right keywords is really important, but the other important thing, as we can see, is how you put them together.  So not using the whole sentences, but using connector words, and we use AND, OR, and NOT when we use the databases to connect the keywords.

 

The way this work, for instance, if I'm looking for people who watch both Big Bang theory and NCIS, although it is counterintuitive, if you use AND you'll get a smaller set.  If you use OR, you will get everybody in both circles, so with OR you will get more results, that is an easy way to remember it.

 

You can also use NOT, although that is tricky because you will almost inevitably be taking out things you might be able to use when you put that in.  So if I search for people who watch NCIS but NOT Big Bang theory, I will miss that piece of my circle here that overlap between the two.  So I'll have my NCIS circle with a little bite taken out of it because I said NOT people who watch Big Bang theory.

 

So hopefully that illustration makes it a little easier to understand how it works.

 

If we go back to our searches, just to reiterate how it works -- usually, if you are searching for two or three concepts of a time, that works best.  If you are looking for really general terms -- back and make it challenging.  So if I am looking at math for preschool children or we can put in early childhood education.  If I search that, you can see that I am going to get 3600 results, which is an awful lot.  I probably don't want to look at that many.

 

As I mentioned, you can look to the subject lines and see here that preschool education is a subject.  Mathematics is a subject.  I know from doing this in the past, that early childhood education is also a subject.  So we can use tools in the database to look for these as subjects instead of searching just or anywhere in the articles. 

 

If we do that, the difference being that if we look for it as a subject term and we know it is used as a subject term from looking through those initial results, we will be finding articles that are actually  about those things as opposed to articles that might just mentioned them as they relate to other concepts.

 

So that, off the top, reduces it from over 3000 to 1200.  We still have too many but were starting to get a better grip -- a more focused results list.

 

Usually what I would recommend is searching a third concept for this because, again, you are doing such a broad  concept, so you could add in readiness and search that.  You could also try searching for math instruction.  Or teaching methodology.  You could search any of a number of different things, different aspects of math in preschool, to search for it.

 

You can see from the drop down that you can also search in the abstracts, so if it is mentioned in the summary that will give it more focus, if you find a favorite author you can search for authors.  And you can search also for the titles.  So if you're looking for a specific article, you can search for the titles as well.

 

Let's just take a look, a little closer look, at the results list.  You can see here that we have the full text available.  This is telling us it is from an academic journal.  Sometimes you are going to get a find at Walden button -- when you get that button, click on it, it will take you into a different database or give you suggested databases for where to go for the full text.

 

This is just the databases talking to each other to make it easier for you to find what you are looking for.

 

And you can see that in this one, again, it is a slightly different layout.  But you have the PDF link here.  At the top.  Her graph other things that you can do when you are searching -- or looking through your results list research is to click on the title of any of the results.  And from that, you can get all of the author information, the specifics on the source, all of the subject headings, and it will also give you the abstract.  The abstracts can be really useful, they can be great timesavers because by reading the abstract, which is just a quick summary, you can find out if you really want to go ahead and dive in and read the whole article.  Sometimes you will look through the abstract and think that it really does not have as much to do with your topic as you thought.  And so you can move onto the next thing.

 

Sometimes you look at it and realize it is right on target so you want to for sure read it.

 

For reading, you can use the tools over here on the right.  You could put them in to your Google drive, print them, email them to yourself, save them to your hard drive, all different tools available here.  That APA help I mentioned before, that is found here with the site function -- you can to help further formatting for your reference page.  And it is not perfect, but it is a good start.

 

Here, you can see that it is giving you the full APA citation, but it does have the capitalization incorrect for the title of the article so you would have to fix that.  It is still a lot easier than copying and pasting that than to start from scratch for your APA formatting for your references.  At least that is how I look at it, but you will see what works for you as you move forward.

 

So that is kind of what you are finding as you go in there, in a nutshell.  Searching in the subject lines and in the abstracts is what we call in the labor business using the indexing.  And that is an easy way to take advantage of the fact that the information here is really well organized.  And so getting, like I said, 75 results for preschool readiness for math is going to be a lot easier than wading through millions of hits on Google.

 

Do you have any questions come up so far?  Anything I should go over again?

 

>>         KIM BURTON:  No, not so far someone has a question -- we were able to get their answers but nothing else.

 

>>        ANNE ROJAS:  Okay.  Well, we will go back to the slide deck then.  Just remember, that all databases work this way.  So you can go in and get some experience under your belt using education source, which is a great place to start.  And that will help you search any of the library databases in the future, whether you are continuing, just to do your undergraduate, you probably will not need much more than education source in ARIC or to go into the main undergraduate databases.  Just be ready to skim titles, subject lines and abstracts.

 

And remember that synonyms are your friends.  And there are lots of tools you can use that will be saving you lots of time down the road.

 

We have more tools if you go to the "get help" page from the library.  And also we have Google Scholar search box and a tool for verifying peer review.  So we will go over that really quickly.

 

"Get help" is from the start your research, next to start your research tab.  As you can see that the webinars are available here, both upcoming and recorded.  We also have tutorials, webinars tend to be between 30-60 minutes.  Tutorials are under 10 minutes, so they are much more focus on a single skill.

 

And we also have library skills guides which will give you a list of links to static pages that will give you help for finding full text, finding books, how to use Google Scholar, and many other topics as well.

 

We do have that quick answers search box too.  And I should mention it is answers to frequently asked questions, not just in the library but for all student support.  So if you have APA questions, you can find those with writing center resources.  There is the financial aid and career services.  So really, just about anything.

 

We even have technical help available here particularly if you're having trouble with PDFs, a lot of people run into snags with those.  Next to get help is to start your research.  And for that, we have lots of different ways to  get into all the different types of resources that we have as well as that A-Z list, the alphabetical list of databases and we you can go straight into the row as well.

 

We have the benefit of doing a Google Scholar search from this library search box -- is that when you search from the library Google Scholar search box it is going to be connected to our holding so it will give you these "find at Walden" links to help you find full text.  And that works the same way that the "find at Walden's" worked when we were in the library databases, you just continue to follow the links to get into your full text.  So it is really slick.  And it works almost all the time.

 

Also, under, start your research, we have a link to Ulrich's .  The one big drawback to searching and goal Scholar is that you can't limit it to peer review.  So sometimes if you find things to Google Scholar if you are looking through a reference list you might want to go into Ulrich's to search for the journal title and see if this is something that really goes to the peer review process.  You can search for your journal title here, and what we are looking for is the striped shirt that is actually a referee shirt.  Because refereed is another term for peer-reviewed.

 

When you pull up the listing, you can see that my Journal of academic librarianship has the referee shirt.  That means any research articles I find in that journal have been through the peer review process.

 

That is just an easy way to verify the peer review status of any of your journals.

 

Again, that is found from start your research, and you can find both Google Scholar search box that is connected to the library as well as Ulrich's for verifying peer review from that page.

 

So that is pretty much it in a nutshell.  Basically, you are in school, you have to look at information a little differently.  Sources have to be reliable.  And oftentimes, your instructors are going to ask for scholarly resources.  You have access to a really good library, so take advantage of it and use it.

 

In her memory of lots of tools available to you in the library.  And help -- all you have to do is learn what the tools are and familiarize yourself with them.  Spending a little time up front will save you time down the road.  But it does not mean you are alone.

 

You can always ask us for help.  And to do that, you can go to our, ask a librarian, button from the library website.  And you can see that you can contact us via email should we have chat hours available for at least a couple hours every day.  You can leave a voicemail.  And doctoral students have the research appointments available to them as well.

 

So, any other questions?

 

>>         KIM BURTON:  Anne, can you show us again where you can access the quick answers from the library homepage?

 

>>        ANNE ROJAS:  Absolutely.  From the library homepage, there are lots of different ways you can get there, but one of the easiest ways is from "ask a librarian," it has the quick answers available right here.  I think those are embedded in a lot of pages  along the way as well.  And...  We also had them -- sorry -- we also have them available from the education research page.  We have the quick answers of search link available there as well.  It will give you a big search box.

 

Yes, it is a beautiful thing, the quick answers.  Like I said, you can find answers to all sorts of things there, not just the library.

 

>>         KIM BURTON:  Someone did have a question.  For doctoral appointments -- is not available after the topic has been approved or if you are just in the doctoral program?

 

>>        ANNE ROJAS:  Just if you are in a doctoral program, you can book those anytime.  It is 30 minutes one-on-one with a librarian.  You can just click on that to open it up.  We meet via Skype and phone, sometimes zoom.  And you would just go into the Riley College, if you are in the education program and then you can see what we have available.  And it will just pop up as what is available.  In there.

 

>>         KIM BURTON:  I like to recommend either choosing Zoom or Skype.  I know you have both Zoom and Skype.  It is nicer for students because then we can share our screen and show you exactly what we are talking about, in case there's any technology problems.  On the telephone sometimes it is hard to walk people through.

 

>>        ANNE ROJAS:  That is true.  If you have the bandwidth to do the video for screen sharing, that can be really, really helpful in appointment times.  Anything else?

 

>>         KIM BURTON:  I do not see any other questions coming in.  I think everybody knows in ask a librarian to ask a question, we respond very quickly to the emails there.

 

>>        ANNE ROJAS:  We answer seven days a week and the turnaround times are pretty short.  Do not be shy -- just ask.  ok well that about wraps it up then, thank you for coming tonight.  And if you have any questions just look for us in "ask a librarian."

 

>>         KIM BURTON:  Thank you, bye-bye.

 

End Transcript

 

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