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Session 15: Education, Journalism, and Public Administration Education Three overview articles about education are found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
"Learning
Theory," (pdf file),
EB As one of the largest colleges on most college and university campuses, teaching education is the largest professional-preparation programs in American higher education today. Most higher education professional preparation degree programs are partitioned into areas by the age and stage of development of those to be educated--early childhood, elementary, and secondary programs. The curriculum of these colleges of education covers a broad set of aspects of education--from curriculum, instruction, educational organization, educational leadership to learning theory, professional practice, psychology, and special education. The overarching comprehensive recurrent bibliography of the professional area of education is, of course, ERIC. In fact, so in demand is this service that there are several different publishers (vendors) who offer a version of it. ERIC is an initialism that stands for Educational Resources Information Center. It is a federally-funded national information service that has been operating since the mid 1960's, operated by the US. Department of Education:
ERIC has both an electronic side (CD-ROM-based searching and online searching) and a print side. Indeed, the ERIC database corresponds to two printed journals: Resources in Education (RIE) and Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE), all these formats providing access to some 14,000 documents and over 20,000 journal articles per year. .The ERIC database is composed to two types of records:
The journal articles are, as you would expect, from those journals that the producers of ERIC expect to be of interest to the ERIC services' audience. There are approximately 2,000 journals whose new issues are indexed and abstracted by ERIC. ERIC "documents" provide coverage of conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books and monographs that are brought to the attention of the ERIC services. You have a choice for online searching the ERIC at OU Libraries: ERIC through the EBSCO database service or ERIC through the FirstSearch database service.
As cited above, the two versions of the ERIC service are ERIC (EBSCO) and ERIC (FirstSearch). Here, for example, is what a typical search results page will look like in EBSCO's version of the ERIC database:
We have noted with a red arrow the documents in this list that are available to you as downloaded pdf files. All you do is click on the "Full text from EDRS" link (EDRS stands for ERIC Document Reproduction Service), which fetches the pdf file for you and displays it on your browser (you must have the Adobe Acrobat reader plugin installed on your microcomputer, of course). Few searchers are knowledgeable about all of the powerful search fields and features of the ERIC database. The ERIC database record includes a number of special fields of data that can be used for very, very sophisticated search strategies.
As with many of the other social science areas, there are other databases that are useful to someone investigating an educational topic. Mental Measurements Yearbook allows one to look up reviews and commentary on standardized tests, as well as psychological and aptitude tests. It is a good way to find the computed reliability of a standardized test, for example. A special collection of journal articles is available to the OU searcher--those having to do with professional and continuing development for teachers. Professional Development Collection allows you to locate full text articles that have to do, generally, with education or education-related journal articles. Most of the journal titles covered by this service make full text copies of articles available to OU's users. Following, for example, are the first five items returned on a search for articles that were available full text on the keywords "information literacy:"
For other, related areas to education, see the comprehensive recurrent tools available in psychology, especially learning theory and cognition. As highly visible as the topic of education is on the nation's public agenda, almost any of the broad, general tools (Academic Search Elite, ArticleFirst, Newsbank Full Text Newspapers, and Newspaper Source, etc.) will include commentary and news on education in the United States.
The subject guide we have maintained for the
topic of education is
Education Resources. An overview of law is given in an article about the legal profession in Encyclopaedia Britannica:
As indicated in the EB article, journalism is the professional area involved in the "collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through such media as pamphlets, newsletters, newspapers, magazines, radio, motion pictures, television, and books." Neither communication nor journalism have the kind of ongoing, recurrent bibliographic control that most of the other disciplines and professional areas in the social sciences have. Journalism is covered, tangentially, by the other social science disciplinary tools (ERIC and PAIS (FirstSearch) especially), and the general indexing and abstracting tools such as ArticleFirst and LexisNexis Academic. For dissertations, one can use a specialized, open, web-accessible tool:
See our subject guide, for a list of links to content and bibliographic resources in journalism: Journalism Resources. Public Administration Public administration is the "planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, and controlling of government operations." That definition is from the EB article on public administration:
As a professional practice area, components of public administration overlap, first and foremost, with political science. As well, public administration merges with the business literature, especially its emphasis on human resources and management aspects. Too, public administration is found in the literature of economics, and of course, history. Without question, the most complete search for a public administration topic begins in the political science tools, such as World Political Science Abstracts. Don't forget to check bibliographic resources generated as a byproduct of US government activities in the legislative, judicial, and executive sides (Congressional Universe, GPO, Statistical Universe). Do not overlook historical tools in your search strategy (America: History and Life, Historical Abstracts, LexisNexis Academic). Interdisciplinary tools such as PAIS (FirstSearch) are important to you as well.
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