Searching other databases

I ran searches in a range of databases that were recommended for early childhood education topics, including:
·    A+Education
·    ERIC
·     MAS Ultra: School Edition
·     Primary Search
·     Professional Development Collection
·     PsycINFO
·    ProQuest Education Journals
·    The Learning Federation (TLF) Content Repository

EBSCOhost Searches

One of the advantages of EBSCOhost is that several databases can be searched simultaneously. The ones suggested for Early Childhood Education were ERIC, MAS Ultra: School Edition, Primary Search, Professional Development Collection; and PsycINFO.  

Search results

The following table compares the results of searches in Informit, using EBSCOhost to search ERIC and then to simultaneously search ERIC; MAS Ultra: School Edition; Primary Search; Professional Development Collection; and PsycINFO. Note that the single quotation marks in Informit searches are replaced by double quotation marks in EBSCO Host searches. Boolean operators AND and OR were used to make the searches more specific. NOT was used to limit the search results to those specific to the context. The choice of search field was also used to narrow or broaden the search, depending up the number of results returned.

A limited number of the items returned were relevant to this project. Some of the results returned were not relevant to this topic because they were:

·   studies with pre-service preschool or early childhood teachers rather than studies related to working witH children

·   studies were specific to students with disabilities

·   studies that were specific to science or mathematics rather than language learning, SOSE and HPE

·   the use of the word ‘inquiry’ related to the research project rather than early childhood pedagogy

·   the items related to ‘literacy’ rather than ‘information literacy’

·   not available to QUT.

The more searching and reading that I did, the more related terms I found. After a while, it became easier to organise the search terms in a table. Further search terms identified by scanning subjects, abstracts and the contents of articles found by these searches included: philosophical thinking, critical thinking, active learning, play or play-based learning.