Searching, sifting and sorting

The children’s responses to the first questionnaire had made me curious about the relationships amongst inquiry-based learning, information literacy and metacognition.

TAYLOR & FRANCIS ONLINE

I didn’t have very much experience with Taylor & Francis Online, so I  decided to use it to search for articles about the metacognitive skills and use of meta-language by young children.

I found this database’s advanced search form to be more restrictive than that of EBSCOHost. As you can see from the screen shot below, it uses the Boolean operators to link searches of particular fields, rather than allowing you to select a field and a Boolean operator for each search term.

Francis & Taylor Online has a number of filter options inclulding limiting a search:

·         to items to which you have full access

·         by publication type

·         by publication date

·         by subject area.

SEARCHING

I began by searching for “metacognition AND young children” in the Article/Chapter Title field and this returned one item.

Self-regulation and metacognition in young children's self-initiated play and Reflective Dialogue

Sue Robson

Journal: International Journal of Early Years EducationVolume 18, Issue 3, September 2010, pages 227-241

Then broadened the search by using the same search term in the Keywords field. This returned 2 items, the one by Robson and:

A Phenomenological Analysis of the Metamemory of Five Six-year-old Children

Shirley Larkin

Journal: Qualitative Research in PsychologyVolume 4, Issue 4, December 2007, pages 281-293.

To further broaden the search, I used the same search term in the Full Text field.

This returned 1205 results.

I then filtered the results for by publication date and limited the results to items to which I had full access.

There were still 377 results. I scanned through them quickly. I found one interesting item.

Thinking About Thinking: Developing Metacognition in Children

Robert Fisher Early Child Development and Care
Vol. 141, Iss. 1, 2006

So I went back to the advanced search form to filter the search results by selecting subject areas and using the Boolean operator NOT to elliminate articles related to other age groups and special needs groups.

This resulted in two items that were different to the two that I had already found. So I downloaded these citations as well. 

Results

1. Exploring Young Children's Conceptions About ThinkingAngela K. Salmon, Teresa Lucas Journal of Research in Childhood Education
   Vol. 25, Iss. 4, 2011
   
2. Dialogic teaching: developing thinking and metacognition through philosophical discussionRobert Fisher Early Child Development and Care
   Vol. 177, Iss. 6-7, 2007

SIFTING

When choosing articles I look first at currency, then relevance and authority.

Currency

To determine whether an article is going to be useful, I look first at its currency. The easiest way to do this is by limiting the search to a span of years in the publication date field of an advanced search. I prefer to use articles that are 5-10 years old. However, when there is limited material available on a topic I also use older articles, particularly if they are cited by the most recent material available.

Relevance

To determine relevance,  first I scan the list of titles in the search result. This also helps me to identify trends in the search results that will suggest words for expanding the search (e.g. OR thinking) and limiting the search in a Boolean search (e.g. NOT adolescent, NOT old age).

Next I read the abstracts of the most likely sources. It they appear to be related to the topic, I download the item and read the introductions and conclusions. For this unit, I tried to determine whether the research was underpinned by or related to constructivist or connectivist learning theory.

In the search for articles about metacognition in young children I also included the source title “Early Child Development and Care” in the advanced search “Publication Name” field, but that only resulted in the one item (Fisher, 2006) that I had already found in the broader search. So I looked at the publications of some of the early search results. Journal of Research in Childhood

Authority

One way to determine the authority of an article is to see if it is peer reviewed. Most academic database advanced search mechanisms allow the searcher to restrict their searches to ‘peer reviewed’. Another indicator of reliability can be how often the source is cited in other works. Google Scholar offers this type of data.

Once I have downloaded an item, I look at the reference list to determine the extent of its literature scan and I read the description of the research method to determine whether the research findings appear valid or might have wider applicability.

SORTING

When I am researching a topic, I like to keep a track of my searches by saving the search results in well named directories that indicate the search engine and date. I save a list of the search terms and results in the same directory as the pdf files.

At the start of the searching process I also tried to keep a log of my searches in spreadsheet form, but found that I would get carried away with searching and forget to enter the information into the log.

Searching always takes much longer than I expect it to.

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.