Research Questions
Searching is easy; doing it well is difficult. Key concepts help focus your search, and word variations (spellings/synonyms) verify results are screened and checked-in successfully. I pre-flight screened my questions:
How does inquiry learning strengthen and change a primary school student’s engagement with a learning topic?
What are the possible challenges encountered by stakeholders when implementing inquiry learning in the primary school classroom?
What role does the teacher librarian play in promoting and supporting inquiry learning in the primary school environment?
Security detected an issue with Question Two: stakeholders was too broad and was escorted off the flight. Stand-by concepts student and teacher boarded instead.
Searching A Whole Question
94% of students use Google for re-searching (2012). I Google: How many engines on an A380? Where is the airport? Generally, questions are answered. But, what about re-searching? I threw my whole questions into some search facilities:
| Q | Google Scholar | ProQuest Education | ProQuest Eric | A+ Education | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 42,400,000 | 27,000 | 3,938 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2 | 5,040,000 | 41,700 | 6,194 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 3 | 15,500,000 | 26,500 | 2,513 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Table 1. Results of full question searches. Google & Google Scholar results are approximate.
Result 42,399,999 could be vital, but at one second per result, it will take a year and half to reach! ERIC, A+ Education and Twitter must have related results too. Time to call in quarantine and isolate the important results.
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Hi Elizabeth,
I thoroughly enjoyed reading through your expert searching section. I particularly enjoyed your use of the travel metaphor throughout your blog – it represents the inquiry learning journey well. I can see a great amount of effort and critical thought went into your searching of your research questions. I really liked how you used different visuals to show new questions or thoughts.
Through your expert searching posts, I learnt about the different searching tools or features that worked and didn’t work – your conclusion on Google advanced search was interesting as you would think that it would be a useful tool. I also found it very interesting that you tested organising search strings in different ways and that it produced different results even though the same search string terms were used. I hadn’t thought of doing this and wouldn’t think it would produce such varied results.
My only wonder was if you adhered to the word limit for the assignment as this section was allocated approximately 800 words. I can see that you have conducted a very thorough analysis of your findings and I too had difficulty narrowing down the information to include on my blog. That was my only thought about this section of your inquiry learning.
Thanks for allowing me access!
Kirsty Harris
Thank you Kristy, and glad you enjoyed the journey. There was so much more to say, but the highlights are here. I appreciate the time and effort gone into your feedback.