Expert searching - Getting your bearings...

“The meaning of ‘knowing’ has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it.” 

- National Research Council, 2007

The internet is a daunting place in many respects. This post details my attempts to 'get my bearings' the expert searching maze. I admit to taking an (at times) rambling approach and, as though I was in a real maze, going back and forth between platforms and search engines a little, sometimes back-tracking when I found something worked in one and trying it out in another... This is necessarily a 'snapshot' of the process.

Photo by Maxwell Young on Unsplash

Initial attempts - straight into the maze...

Having learnt about Boolean operators and searching long ago (and having forgotten about it in the intervening years), I decided to incorporate this into my search terms map because I thought it would be a more useful starting point than simply typing my inquiry question into Google...

Search Terms Map created with Lucidchart

Googling - left turn...

• I started broad with Google, just to see what was out there...

• Even just the word 'effective' narrowed this significantly to 363 results
  

Tried a few different combinations of terms, sometimes with surprising results...

Key learning:

• successful use of Boolean operatives requires a clear idea of what you are looking for and terms the literature uses, or it can seem random or the results baffling. E.g. when I tried the combination of "inquiry learning" + MYP + "concept based", hoping that by identifying a key pedagogy and curriculum tool of the MYP I would get some more targeted results, I was disappointed. I got nothing particularly new or relevant… I was asking myself am I not using the right language? Or do teachers not equate the MYP concept-based learning with inquiry? Or is this assumed rather than stated?

Google Scholar - right turn...

• Tried this search again, but in Scholar: "inquiry learning" + MYP + "concept based" = much more manageable - 26 results!

Other search strings for Google Scholar and adaptations:

Inquiry + MYP	1500 or so results, then I selected ‘since 2019’ – 53 results, but very varied because of the broad search term.
Inquiry + MYP + “concept-based”	Only 8 results, not promising. Decided to add ‘NOT PYP’ and remove “concept-based”. This gave 29 results, but with very skewed relevance…
Inquiry + “concept-based” + MYP NOT PYP	Broadened to from 2018 as well. One very relevant and comprehensive analysis of the benefits of MYP for teaching and learning… but not much else.

I also tried "[inquiry OR enquiry]" + MYP in Google Scholar and was rewarded with a manageable number of resources and from here I could narrow further based on dates.

Key learning:

• Because the field is narrower with scholar, the searching can yield much more manageable searches.
• HOWEVER, often the articles had a narrow focus on a particular case study or subject OR were not especially helpful for practitioners in the implementation of effective inquiry.

Social Media - left turn...

A few key points about Twitter, with a compilation of search screen shots:

• "Inquiry MYP" searching led me to lots of relevant educational blogs.
• #inquiry #MYP - personal tweets from individual teachers, lots of photographs and individual reflection, rather than educational resources or articles.
• 'ALL of these: MYP inquiry concept-based' - very restricted search while 'ANY of these' was far too broad - all kinds of irrelevant articles.
• too many terms or too many combinations = unproductive, e.g. - the particular combination of ANY benefits 'inquiry learning' (concept-based OR MYP) NOT PYP resulted in 0 findings.
• ANY of 'effective inquiry learning' = more effective in getting articles, videos and blogs, quite controversial responses - the word 'effective' led to pieces critical of inquiry learning. 

Key learning:

• While Twitter Advanced the search function helps to scaffold Boolean operatives fairly effectively, the platform ultimately behaves more unpredictably to google and databases - perhaps, at least in part, because of the ‘folkonomy’ nature of hashtags. Also little way of refining the types of content searched, so you inevitably get quite a lot of 'personal' content.

Databases - another right...

My most successful initial search on Proquest yielded some targeted results:

• Informit however, when I simplified a search to combine of inquiry and concept-based learning...
• Results narrowed so far as to be meaningless, and the more I tried to combine 'concept-based' and 'inquiry' into a phrase - even worse!

Key learning:

• Narrower field of databases and the more academic lens, means that many of the articles which appear were quite niche in their focus - not necessarily useful for practitioners. However, their were some studies about the effectiveness of inquiry. 

Despite some frustrations, the fruits of my labour can be seen in the end results - my Inforgraphic, summarising my findings, and a curated collection of the most useful resources which will follow.