Answered Questions

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The LibGuides are lists of places to look for information, so if I want information about education, the Education LibGuide is the place to start. Clicking the Articles tab takes me to places to look for articles about education. The best sources are listed in the middle of the page at the top - Academic Search Complete, Research Library, Professional Development Collection, and Eric at EBSCOhost. Each of these places to look for articles contains different articles (with a little overlap), so I might have to look at more than one. I'll start with Academic Search Complete by clicking on the link and logging into the database.

The next step is to translate the research topic - major issues facing student achievement in schools today - into search terms which will give me good results. This can take several tries! I know from prior experience that "academic achievement" (with the quotation marks) is a good search term. I thought of single words that would mean "major issues" such as impediment. I combined these into a search string - "academic achievement" AND impediment . That didn't work so I tried several other combinations.

As I looked at the results, I hit on a new term - underachievement ! If looking for problems related to achievement didn't bring the results I needed, how about the opposite? On the main search page I typed in underachievement and clicked the boxes for full text and peer reviewed. I added Published Date from 2001 to 2012 and clicked search. That gave me 247 results, all peer reviewed articles.

I can start looking at those, or I can narrow my results. To narrow, I scrolled down the page, watching the left toolbar until I saw Subject: Thesaurus Term and clicked on it. There are several topics to choose from. I chose underachievers and looked at those results. Then I backed out of those and checked another topic.

Underachievement only deals with issues facing underachieving students in particular. The same searching techniques could be used to search specific factors impacting all students, such as class size, parental involvement, medical issues such as ADHD, school funding, teaching style, etc.

If this doesn't help, email us back and we'll explore the topic some more.