Searching for Journal Articles

The Professional Library provides 2 professional education databases for TDSB teachers and administrators: Proquest and Ebsco.  These are absolutely fabulous for any teacher taking AQ courses.

These databases index and make available in full text format gazillions of journal articles pertaining to education and teaching. If you need articles on reading, ADHD, ESL (and lots more); if you want articles by Michael Fullan (anyone), if you want to see the latest issues from specific journals; you can search for all of them in these databases.  Once you have found what you want, you can choose to read the articles online, you can print them, or you can email them (great for group or committee work).

To use them, you must first of all be a TDSB teacher. Second, you need to get to the Library TEL conference or TDSBweb page.  On TEL, the path is: TDSB Conferences ->Resource Centre.TEL -> Prof.Library.TEL. To find us on TDSB go to the TDSB Internet page and select About Us menu ->Staff Login ->TDSBweb -> Services drop down menu-> Professional Library. In TEL and TDSBweb, look for the page that says something like “Search for Articles”.

As ever, call us if you get stuck.

Rowan

Reading assessment by any other name

Any teacher taking Reading AQ courses may end up needing information on the topic of reading assessment, and there are scads of books and articles on this topic. When you search the journal databases, the term “reading assessment” tends to give you articlespertaining to standardarized and high-stakes tests and this is not what teachers want. Teachers are looking for articles that discuss informal assessment that can be used in the classroom.

So, how do you search for articles that assess reading informally in the classroom? You need to search the journal databases using specific assessment strategies. The popular ones include: anecdotal records, cloze, miscue, observation/observations logs, portfolios, questioning for comprehension and meaning, response journals, retells, rubrics, running records, student-led conferences, surveys (eg student interests, habits and parental role).

Try using the strategies listed above as stand-alone search terms. If you get too many hits do an advanced seach and link them with reading as a subject (remember that many of the search fields are drop-down menus and you can link a word to the subject or title or author).

Easy, right?  Call the library if  you get stuck. Even better if you can do it from a networked computer and one of the Librarians can work you though it.

Rowan