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Education Psychology: ERIC Advanced Search

ERIC Thesaurus

  • ERIC has a thesaurus of subject terms, called Subject Headings, that are assigned to all the articles and documents indexed in the database. To get to the thesaurus, click Advanced Search and then Thesaurus in the top right corner
  • In the Thesaurus search box, type: teachers
  • At Select Display, click in the radio button beside Alphabetical Index: this will give you all the Subject Headings starting with "teachers"
  • Click Teachers
  • The ERIC thesaurus gives you a list of broader, narrower and related terms you might use as synonyms in your search
  • Note two of the narrower terms: beginning teachers, and student teachers

ERIC: Advanced Search

  • In ERIC, click the Advanced Search tab

  • Note the Help link in the upper right: every page of the database has this context-specific help. From the Advanced Search page, it will give you help with that. If you’re in a jam, use the Help link

  • We’ll look for articles and documents on teaching students with Asperger Syndrome

  • There are two concepts in this search: Teaching/Class instruction and Asperger Syndrome

  • In the first box of the first line of search boxes, type: Teaching Methods OR Class Instruct*
  • Leave it Anywhere to search this term as a keyword: ERIC doesn't have a Subject Heading for Class instruction
  • The * is the sign for truncation in ERIC, and in most library databases. Truncation finds anything starting with the root before the asterisk, in this case, "Instructing", "Instructors", "Instruction". It saves us from typing in both words joined with the Boolean operator "OR".
  • In the first box of the second line of boxes, type: Asperger Syndrome
  • At Anywhere, use the drop-down menu to select Subject Heading (all). Subject Headings are what ERIC calls its subject terms from the Thesaurus. "Asperger Syndrome" is a Subject Heading from the Thesaurus
  • At Date Range : Earliest, use the drop-down menu to select 2006
  • At to, leave it at 2011
  • Click Search
  • ERIC divides the results into different document and non-document types by tabs at the top
  • Note the tab reading "Scholarly Journals." “Peer-reviewed” means that an article had to be cleared by a group of the author’s peers (i.e., other education experts) before it could be published. This is the type of article you need for your research
  •  If a record has “Full-text Linking” at the bottom, it is available online through ERIC
  • If an article is not available full text through the ERIC database, do a journal title search in the library's catalogue to find out whether we have it through another database or in paper copy, or click Where can I get this under the article's record