SPE 325 - Brewer

Here are a few tips to help you develop a good search strategy:

Use two or three keywords rather than a complete sentence.

Driving Question: I am looking for learning strategies that help students with mild-moderate disabilities in the following subject matters (ie decision making, problem-solving, and critical thinking in math, reading or writing).

Keywords: Learning strategy, students, mild-moderate disability, disabilities.

Techniques:
Using quotation marks to help with the grouping of words can help find what you are looking for...

• Example: "Learning strategies", "problem-solving"

Use Synonyms

• Our goal is to always simplify phrases or keywords but knowing what synonyms are being used in the research is very important.
  • Example: learning strategies ->Cognitive strategies, Mnemonic strategies & Compensatory strategies for speaking and writing.

Truncation symbol, [an asterisk (*), dollar sign ($), or plus sign (+), etc.], with the root/stem of a word broadens your search to include various wording endings:

child*=child or children or childhood

Wildcard symbol may also be used to replace a single character to include different spellings:

wom?n for women or woman

Databases use different symbols so check the searching help.

Boolean operators or connectors are tools that allow you to narrow or broaden your search.

AND
Using AND between your search terms will narrow your search.  For example, searching elections AND contributors will find resources with both terms, giving you more specific results. You can keep adding terms with AND to conduct more narrow searches: elections AND contributors AND special interests AND federal law.

OR
Using OR between your search terms will broaden your search.  The OR operator is useful when a term has a frequently used synonym. Examples: Political Action Committee OR PAC; college OR university, corn OR maize. Conducting a search using the OR operator will find resources with either term, giving more results.

NOT
Using NOT between your search terms will narrow your search. NOT allows you to exclude a word or phrase from your search. For example, elections NOT presidential will find resources on elections (local, Senate, etc.) but exclude information about Presidential elections.