Authoritative and useful descriptions of research methods can be hard to find. SAGE has a deep shelf of social science publications that they draw upon for this new and easy-to-browse tool. SRMO integrates content from over 500 of their book titles, including the entire QASS (aka Little Green Book) series, plus several of their dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Sage Research Methods Online visual tree navigation screenshot
SRMO features an innovative navigational feature they call the “Methods Map” for visualization of relationships between methods. Use it to discover new methods and content related to them. Underpinning the Methods Map is a taxonomy of social science research methods, developed by SAGE, and containing over 1,400 unique terms.
We had to trial this a few times before we reached the right audience for it. But happily, it seems to be making inroads with the PhD student community and the instructors who teach “Research Methods” courses in the various social sciences disciplines.
Because this resource is built upon the contents of hundreds of stand-alone volumes of social science research methods literature, we are also taking steps so each individual book will have its own record in the library catalog as another way users can discover this great info – I will post an update when this has been accomplished.
(updated 4/16/2012)
The 2011 Almanac issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education has just been published. You’ll find the latest data on enrollments, tuition, compensation, research, and much more—all in one convenient, 90-page special issue of The Chronicle. See the hard copy version on the Library’s shelf or login to the electronic version online here.
After logging in, or from on-campus locations, the Almanac is located here.
Special sections with in-depth data on individual institutions, rankings and summary statistics include the following:
See also the sortable table ranking all 50 states on key education measures.
Enjoy!
TS
New Beta Feature from www.ERIC.ed.gov
Would you like to share your ERIC searches with a community of people with similar interests? Are you curious about what others are searching—and finding—in your topic area? ERIC is pleased to announce the release of a new Shared Search feature that is currently undergoing beta testing.
Shared Search is part of the “My ERIC” customization tool at www.eric.ed.gov.
My ERIC users can now select a community of interest, for example, science education, and a role related to that community, such as teacher. With these selections in place, individuals may then choose to share their searches with others in the community, browse others’ searches in My Community Research, and/or receive an e-mail alert whenever any new ERIC records meeting search specifications are added to the ERIC Collection.
Community members are invited to tag and describe their searches to help others understand their parameters.
Shared Search will add an important new layer of social functionality to the content-rich ERIC Collection. Individuals who wish to share individual records or searches with a group smaller than a whole community may continue to use the Bookmark & Share feature in the Search Results area.
The Shared Search feature extends sharing to a larger group of people with similar interests, who may in turn choose to make their own searches available.
For more information about My ERIC, or to register, go to www.eric.ed.gov/myeric.
Today’s blog posting is an odd testament to the success of the Summon discovery layer on the Library’s front page under the “Articles & More” tab that was introduced one short year ago. Despite my best efforts to present Summon as just one stop on the education research path, today I got the question “Where else can I find education research besides the Articles & More tab?” My somewhat elaborated response follows.
I’m delighted to hear that the “Articles & More” tab has gotten you started. But it sounds as though you could benefit from using a more precise search tool. Do you recall any of those I mentioned from our webinar? How about http://www.eric.ed.gov ? What I recommend is that you start by looking up each of those articles that you already found – just paste in the author last name and some title keywords on the http://www.eric.ed.gov site. Then a few options present themselves.
1.) Observe the “descriptors” for each article – copy and paste them all into an MSWord doc. See which really descriptor terms nail your topic. Perhaps a combination of those terms captures it best? Try searching these terms on ERIC as “Descriptors” – in the advanced search page you can use the drop down menus for each search box to specify they search only descriptors. Some of these descriptors you find on your ERIC article might have two words or more. If so, be sure to use quotes around them so they’re searched as a phrase. Don’t be satisfied with just one search – do many and use the descriptors in different combinations. This will scour ERIC – which is really the best source for education research. You can also use the link built into each ERIC entry to “Show related items” – that works in a similar fashion to the descriptor search I described.
2.) Again in ERIC, you can chase the citations for each of the articles that you found. In other words, who did the authors of each of your articles cite? For this you’ll need to click through the the full text of each of your initial articles. Study the works cited, then search those Author/Title details in ERIC or Google Scholar (below) Remember there are two kinds of content in in ERIC – Documents that will probably be full text on the ERIC website and Journal articles that you’ll have to get through Drexel. For full text of articles, either click through the “Find in a Library” link on the ERIC page or come back to “Articles & More” tab on the Drexel library front page and look up citations there, or with the Summon advanced search page.
3.) Going beyond ERIC, if you’re not satisfied with the “backward” citations you find there, try looking up each article you already have using http://scholar.google.com to find the “forward” citations for each. Just paste in the author name and article title in the one search box and you’ll most likely find the citation. If it’s a good article, other authors will have cited it and you can click on the link “Cited by …” to see related newer articles
4.) Also, don’t forget books – try http://www.worldcat.org to see what you find there. Select the tab to search only books, and try using terms similar to those you found helpful in Summon and ERIC. Not enough results from your keywords? Try separating your search terms with AND and replacing the last few letters of each term with an asterisk so that you get more results, for example:
+ influences of parents and cultural background on student literacy success
becomes …
+ parent* and cultur* and literacy
Give that a try and let me know if it’s helpful!
Regards,
Tim Siftar
The Provost’s Office has purchased a subscription to several dozen of the most recent faculty development videos available from Magna Publications. High quality presenters cover topics in the areas of: Academic Affairs, Campus Legal, Distance Education, Enrollment Management, Faculty Development, Student Affairs, Teaching Online. Intended solely for faculty use, these videos are available in DVD format from the Hagerty Library Reserve Desk, or in streaming format over the web.
To view the DVD records for the entire Magna collection, use the Library Catalog to search Author = Magna
There is a link in each DVD record to the Reserve record for the course “Faculty Development”
Faculty may log in with their current Drexel ID/PW. Then a course-specific PW will be requested. Faculty may contact the Hagerty Reserve Desk by phone (215-895-2756) or email (reserve@drexel.edu) to receive this PW.
In addition the individual DVD’s will also show up as results of keyword searches in the catalog, such as this example.
Enjoy!
Tim Siftar
From the director of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” comes this much acclaimed documentary that takes on the question of why so many people feel shortchanged by the public school education experience.
Coming soon to an art-house theater near you, it sounds like a good exercise in asking questions.
It’s not clear what solutions are proposed. Here’s a brief interview with the filmmaker, Davis Guggenheim.
Once it becomes available, we’ll be adding it to our collection.
Enjoy,
Tim
Question: How do I get full articles from the free government site www.eric.ed.gov?
Answer:
You have a few options.
1.) The easiest to describe is just take the journal title from the citation you want, and look up that journal title in our library catalog (notice drop down menu to specify your search as “Journal Title.” Then follow “Online access: Full-text options” links from the catalog record to the SFX page with the yellow bar and click the “GO” button next to the title. It will lead you into one of our vendor databases where you can browse by volume/issue/pages number to find your article.
2.) Maybe even easier to describe is that we also pay for a version of ERIC on the vendor platform called “EBSCOHost.” You can find a link to it in our catalog – if you search just the word “ERIC” it will come up as the first result and take you to this link. Once in ERIC on EBSCO, then do the same search there that you did on the www.eric.ed.gov site. Your results should be the same and all will have links to the full text (if we have access to it) through our SFX system. The link says “Check for full-text availability” or something like that. By the way, we have a 3 minute video about searching using the ERIC thesaurus to search on this EBSCO platform.
3.) Lastly, there’s the way the pro’s do it. There is another free site called www.worldcat.org where you can create a free account where you “set your favorite library” to Drexel’s Hagerty Library. This information is saved in your browser, and it will enable the special link in www.eric.ed.gov that shows up at the bottom of every single ERIC article record under the heading Full-Text Availability Options – see the link for “Find in a Library.” It will provide a link to the Drexel’s SFX linking system and pass you through to our electronic holdings, if we have them.
Any one of those should work. BTW – this is more relevant for journal articles from scholarly publishers. On the other hand, using the eric.ed.gov site for self-published documents usually provides the full text directly without any of this linking issue.
Enjoy!
Tim
Check out our new video tutorial on how to find ethnographies and educational case studies using Education Research Complete!
EbscoHost’s Education Research Complete offers the world’s largest and most complete collection of full text education journals. It is a bibliographic and full text database covering scholarly research and information relating to education. Topics covered include all levels of education from early childhood to higher education, all educational specialties, such as multilingual education, health education, as well as areas of curriculum instruction and administration, policy, funding, and related social issues. The database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 1,870 journals, and full text for more than 1,060 journals.
Primarily for students in the MSHE Sacramento program, tonight’s session will cover the basics quickly as needed: exporting citations from popular education databases that do and don’t support RefWorks, creating bibliographies, etc. Then we’ll get into some finer points, such as publicly sharing bibliographies, linking attachments and using the Ref-Grab-It plugin to capture website details, and the Write-n-Cite plugin to generate in-text (parethetical) references.
Technical requirements:
The session requires a fast internet connection and an up-to-date browser. Wired connections are preferable over wireless, otherwise you may notice poor audio quality. If you have a microphone you may participate in the conversation, but typing questions in the chat box will work too. If you plan to use the built-in mic on your laptop, then you’ll need to wear headphones so as to avoid creating feedback. Plan on joining the e-classroom 5-10 minute prior to the scheduled start time to test your connection. Those who plan to participate using their mic will need to install a tiny Acrobat plugin.
Please note that 7PM PST = 10PM EST
Here’s the link – http://goodwincollege.na4.acrobat.com/edschoolresearch/
See you online!
best,
Tim
ps – Need to schedule an online instruction session? Daytime hours are best, but evening hours can be available by arrangement. Email for details: siftar at drexel.edu
This database is a revised version of the 1997 State Postsecondary Structures Sourcebook that was converted into an interactive database with information about the postsecondary governance structures in each state. Generate profiles of individual state postsecondary governance structures, comparisons between them, or check out a few of their predetermined reports. Published by the Education Commission of the States (www.ecs.org). It’s a good start on that MSHE510 assignment.
As a second step, find the website for your state’s agency. (The directory on the SHEEO website has handy links to all states.) Study your agency’s website carefully. What does the “About Us” link reveal? For example, on the page for the Massachusetts Department of Higher Ed , it lists their mission statement and summary of powers.
If there is no helpful “About Us” section on your state system’s site, I recommend using the Google Advanced Search feature “Search within a site or domain” and paste in the homepage of your target state system, then use keywords such as “governance” or “powers” to come up with your answers.
As an afterthought, I noticed at the bottom of the mass.edu pages they have a “related link” to an informative section of the Massachusetts General Law that was enacted by state legislators to create their system. Wading through the legal language can help clarify any details that are not revealed on your agency’s website. If your agency doesn’t include a link to the legal statute that created them, it is possible to find via Drexel’s subscription to Lexis Nexis as I have detailed in the Higher Education Research Guide.
Lastly, I understand that you need statistics on the high school graduation rate for your chosen state. Whenever you hear “education and statistics” in the same sentence, you should think of the Federal National Center for Education Statistics website. While there are certainly other places to find this data, their report entitled “High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the US: 2007” is the definitive source that all the others will cite. Table #12 entitled: “—Averaged freshman graduation rate of public high school students, by state: School year 2005–06″ seems right.
I’ll update this blog with a posting about your upcoming historical assignment next week.
