Using ERIC to Search for ITT topics

 

Before we do any searching, you need to know that all of ERIC is divided into two parts: Journal Articles and ERIC Documents. The easiest way to tell them apart is to look at the accession numbers--see below. Journal articles are, well, articles in journals. ERIC Documents can be just about anything: reports, articles, papers given at conferences, budgets, huge statistical releases from the government, and so on. 

Journal Articles=EJ

Accession No:EJ670548

Eric Documents=ED
 

Accession No: ED477304

Suppose you were interested in distance education and the Internet? The search below is a reasonable start--but it is only a start because it will give us 1,600+ hits--which is too many. But that doesn't mean we can't use the search. Let's look at the results list. We're going to go fishing for subject headings.

 

 Let's look at the very first citation's subject headings.
 
 
 

 The subject headings or Descriptors as ERIC calls them are below: We could narrow our topic to a method of delivering distance education, namely web based instruction. We could also focus on it as a "trend," e.g. as something currently happening in education.
 

 
 
 

 
This gives us many fewer hits--some of which we can use. But, there's  a great one at the top, a literature review. Literature reviews are useful because they gather relevant articles together in one place. They are in fact annotated bibliographies of a kind.  Note that this literature review is an Eric Document.
 
 
 

 Here is a search for literature reviews in Educational Technology.
 

 
  This search is narrowed by the fact that it only looks at certain years and is limited to WIU's collection.
 

 
 

 Here is example of another ITT oriented subject search