Lamson Library » Education

Course Specific Research Guides

Databases

Serious research at the university level requires that you consult articles from scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. Articles in journals such as these are read and checked by experts prior to being published. While popular magazine articles may be useful, for high quality research you will need to find articles in peer-reviewed journals. To find scholarly articles efficiently, use one or more of the subscription databases provided by Lamson Library and described below. Remember that while many articles in these databases may be available in full text electronically from a database, many journal articles are NOT available in full text online. If an article is not available electronically, a physical copy may be in the library. So if you don’t come into the library, your research will probably be incomplete. Lamson Library has an excellent journal collection in Education. Listed below are the most useful databases for research within the field of Education. To learn more about any database, click the INFO button. A complete list of our Digital Resources are available from the Databases link. Note that to access these databases from off campus, you must first connect to the Plymouth State portal: my.plymouth.edu and then click on the “Library” tab at the top.

Academic Search Premier(many full-text articles) [INFO]
START HERE! This is the largest, scholarly, multi-discipline, full text database. Indexes over 8,300 scholarly and popular journals. Click on the INFO button for help in reading your search results and/or to view an online tutorial.
ERIC(via EBSCOhost; links to full text) [INFO]
ERIC is the world’s largest source of education information, indexing articles from over 1,000 education journals and hundreds of thousands of ERIC documents (such as papers presented at professional conferences or curriculum guides from schools). Click on the INFO button for help in reading the results of your ERIC search and/or to view an online tutorial.
PsycINFO(huge index; links to full-text) [INFO]
Massive psychology database indexing journal articles from over 2,000 journals in over 25 languages, plus book chapters, books, dissertations, and technical reports.
Kraus K-12 Curriculum Guides(many full-text) [INFO]
This database, with the official title of KCDL Online is a searchable cumulative index to over 7,500 PreK-12 curriculum guides, frameworks, and standards from 1983 to the present. The full text is available online for nearly 4,000 documents. The remaining guides are available on microfiche in Lamson Library.
Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database(many full-text articles) [INFO]
The Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database (CLCD) is a resource for an extensive collection of information about children’s books, video and audio recordings, and other children-focused media. The database contains more than 300,000 critical reviews of children’s books–all full-text searchable from 24 review sources. Users can search the database to create lists of children’s titles matching various criteria — such as age or grade level, genre, fiction or nonfiction, and selected “Best Books”.
Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center(all full text)[INFO]
This is a useful database if you are looking for “pro” and “con” essays on controversial topics. In addition to these “Viewpoint” articles, the database also includes other full-text journal articles, as well as statistical tables, overviews of court cases, hundreds of images, and links to reviewed Web sites.

News, Analysis, and Opinion:

The Chronicle of Higher Education
CQ Researcher (all full-text) [INFO]
LexisNexis Academic (business/law/reference; all full-text) [INFO]
LexisNexis Environmental (many full-text) [INFO]
New York Times 1980-present
New York Times Digital Archive, 1851-2004 (all full-text) [INFO]
Newspaper Source (mostly full-text) [INFO]
Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center (all full-text) [INFO]
Regional Business News (many full-text) [INFO]
Union Leader/NH Sunday News (all full-text) [INFO]
Wall Street Journal 1984-present

Reference Sources

Good Reference sources provide an excellent starting point for research. They can give a succinct overview of a topic, highlighting the most important information and recommending additional specific resources. The print Reference Collection is located behind the Reference Desk on the Main Level. For Education materials, browse the “L” section of the Reference Collection. You’ll find such useful subject encyclopedias as the new 8-volume ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EDUCATION and the 3-volume ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SPECIAL EDUCATION. Ask a librarian for assistance if you need help. The link below will provide a listing some of the most important Reference sources in the field of Education. These include Education encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, and statistical sources.

Key Reference Sources in Education

Books and More: Using the Library Online Catalog

The Library catalog is a catalog of all books (both print and e-books) and other materials in Lamson Library – such as videos/DVDs, music CDs, and music scores. It also includes the titles of all the periodicals we have physical copies of, as well as many Web sites. To specifically search the Library Catalog, click the “Search Library Catalog” link in the left frame of the Library Website. Your results may be a combination of many different types of resources, such as books and Web sites. At the university level, you should be using books for nearly every research need. Both historical and new developments may be found in books. When searching the online catalog, be sure to try both a KEYWORD and a SUBJECT search. They will provide different results. There are many ways to structure or modify a search of the online catalog, including ways to find sections or chapters on your topic within a larger work. Ask for assistance at the Reference Desk. Our online catalog is very powerful and allows a variety of specialized searches, such as limiting your search to materials published after a specific year, or limiting your search to find DVD’s or Web sites. Use the Advanced Search link to do specific kinds of searches. To find materials on how to teach a subject, use the sub-heading “study and teaching” after the name of your subject. For example, to find materials on teaching mathematics, do a SUBJECT search of the online catalog for: mathematics study and teaching.

Subject search for Mathematics study and teaching

To find materials in our large K-12 Curriculum Collection, use the subject “K-12 elementary” or “K-12 secondary” followed by the name of the school subject. For example, to find K-12 materials used to teach health at the elementary school level, do a SUBJECT search of the online catalog for: K-12 elementary health.

Subject search for K-12 elementary health

Consult the Library of Congress Classification system to find areas to browse in the general collection or in the reference section.

Web Sites

In general, Web sites are a bad source for research – because there is no guarantee that the information being posted is accurate or up-to-date. Don’t use an Internet site as a reference unless you are sure it’s reputable, scholarly, current, and unbiased. There aren’t many Internet sites that can claim these qualities. Serious research requires that you consult sources such as journal articles from peer-reviewed or scholarly journals, and books from reputable publishers. However, some Web sites can be very helpful. Lamson Library has been selectively choosing key Web sites in Education. Click the Education Web Sites link below to see all these sites, organized under the 26 sections shown below.

Education Web Sites (Selected by Lamson Librarian Gary McCool)
Web site links are available here under the following sections: Associations and Organizations; Career Education and Planning; Child Care; Children’s Literature; Colleges and Universities; Distance Education; Educational Software; Educational Technology; Higher Education; History of Education and Childhood; Home Schooling; Job Postings; Legal; Lesson Plans and Resources; New Hampshire; On-Line Journals; Opinion Pages; School Directories; School Reform and Improvement; School Standards; Special Needs/Special Education; Statistics; Teaching on the WEB; Test Reviews; U.S. Department of Education; Web Pages from K-12 Schools
General Education Web Sites (from the Librarians’ Internet Index)
K-12 Education Web Sites (Librarians’ Internet Index)
Google Directory — Society — Education

Online Reference:

Credo reference (all full-text) [INFO]
Encyclopaedia Britannica (all full-text) [INFO]
Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia [INFO]
Gale Virtual Reference Library (Reference E-books) [INFO]
Encyclopedia of Communication and Information (Gale EBook)
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (all full-text) [INFO]

Style Guide

Most Education courses at PSU require you to use APA Style (from the American Psychological Association) when you format your bibliography and refer to sources in your text. The full APA Publication Manual is available on Permanent Reserve and in Reference. For a summary of examples for your bibliography, see the Library’s online APA Style Guide (available from the Library’s Web site or from the direct link below).

APA Style Guide

Document Delivery / Interlibrary Loan

If you need a book we don’t own or an article from journal we don’t have (or can’t access electronically), we can get these materials for you. That’s what Document Delivery or Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is for – we’ll find the book or journal article you need from another library. To request an item on Document Delivery, log in to MyPlymouth, go to the Library Home Page, click on “Interlibrary Loan (ILLiad)” under “Services” at the left, and fill out the appropriate form. Since we can’t control how rapidly another library may fill your request, you should allow about 10 days to get items from Interlibrary Loan. So you’ll have to plan ahead. “The Library didn’t have what I needed” is never an acceptable excuse.

Librarians

It’s always appropriate to ask the professional Reference Librarian at the Reference Desk for assistance. We can help connect you with an authoritative reference source that might be useful to you, or help you refine a database search to help you find what you need. If you’ve got a class assignment, we’re probably familiar with it and we’re glad to help. You can also ask us a question online, by clicking the “Ask a Librarian” icon on the Library Home Page.

More…

Ask a Librarian
Subject librarian: Gary McCool

discipline=ed, discipline=cd, discipline=erse, subj=education, hint=education, format=subject guide

Education

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