Introduction to Educational Research  

Google Scholar is a great, user-friendly tool to find educational research.  If you are on campus, your searches will link to library resources.  If you are off campus, you will need to adjust your Google Scholar settings as follows:

• Click "Settings" in the upper right hand corner of: http://scholar.google.com
• Click "Library links" on the left side of the Scholar Settings page
• Search for Western North Carolina Library Network
• Check the box
• Click "Save"

Find It! attempts to search everything the library owns, including individual articles. It is the search box featured on the library homepage. For best results, follow these simple tips:

• Use only keywords. For example, if you want to research the relationship between high-stakes testing and student achievement, the keywords are high-stakes tests and student achievement
• Put phrases (and only phrases) in quotes. For example: "high-stakes tests" and "student achievement"
• Put the word and in between each of your keywords: "high-stakes tests" and "student achievement"

Experiment with different combinations of keywords. For example, "academic achievement" is another phrase for student achievement, and "No Child Left Behind" is a phrase that represents high-stakes testing, so another search to get at the same information might be: "academic achievement" and "No Child Left Behind".

After your search, you will find numerous ways to filter your results on the left side of the result screen.  Some of the most popular are to limit to library catalog items, limit to full text, or limit by date.