Answered Questions

While you may find the concept included in books about teaching methods, I think you'll find a lot of great information in articles. Start at the Education LibGuide, located at http://libguides.brenau.edu/education. At the top of the Education LibGuide homepage, click on the yellow Articles tab.

You'll see a list of databases that include Education materials in the middle of the page. Try the first one, Academic Search Complete, to get started in a database with a broad range of items. (You may be asked to log in with your Brenau username and password.)

In the database search box, type in terms for your topic. For example, you could use flip* AND "teaching methods". There are three search techniques being used here:

• AND is a Boolean search technique that tells the database to keep those two terms together.
• Quotation marks around teaching methods tells the database that it is a specific phrase.
• The asterisk symbol after flip is a "wild card" that tells the database to accept all possible endings for that word. (So it will give us articles with flipped or flipping, in addition to just flip!)

Once you have searched for your terms, you'll have a lot of results! Use the options on the side of your results page to further narrow things down. Some helpful options include Full Text (which will show only the results that include the entire article), Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals (which will show only the results from sophisticated academic journals with high levels of scholarship), and Publication Date (which you can modify to show you articles from the last few years). Another to consider is Subject: Thesaurus Term, which lets you click on specific phrases that the database uses to specify your topic further. (It's also great to jot down some of these relevant terms for later searches!)

When you are finished searching in Academic Search Complete, I encourage you to go back to the Education LibGuide's Articles page. Click on another database like Professional Development Collection or Education Journals by ProQuest and run the same search. Database collections are like a Venn diagram - some overlap and may have the same article, but each collection is unique and you may find more helpful articles by searching in different databases.