Entry 2: The information search process begins!

With the literature review for the report in mind, I decided to begin with a simple google search.  My project is based on a Year 11 Visual Art inquiry-based research task, so I used the following string of key terms for my first search:

“inquiry based learning” OR “guided inquiry” OR “inquiry learning” secondary OR “high school” “visual art” OR art

The key terms in quotation marks were used to search for exact phrases.  The boolean operator OR was used to broaden the possible list of relevant search results (with AND being automatic in the Google Search engine).

This delivered over 27 000 hits, and skimming through the results revealed that the while most of them were relevant to inquiry learning, very few, if any, related specifically to the visual art discipline or to art teaching.  One problem with this search was that results relating to ‘the art of teaching science’ or ‘the art of presenting...’ were being returned, which were of no relevance to my topic.

To elliminate these irrelevant hits, I tried the following:

“inquiry based learning” OR “guided inquiry” OR “inquiry learning” secondary OR “high school” “visual art”

Dropping the term ‘art’ from my initial search reduced the number of hits to 1 910, however the results were still not useful for my required information use.

In an effort to obtain the more scholarly information that I was seeking for my literature review, I decided to use Google Scholar.  I used the same search terms as I did for the simple google search:

“inquiry based learning” OR “guided inquiry” OR “inquiry learning” secondary OR “high school” “visual art”

This returned a number of relevant hits, including one source on the use of problem-based learning for teaching the creation and appreciation of art.  Following this, I decided to add ‘problem based learning’ to the above string.  These search strings returned various articles that were of relevance to my topic and context.  I was able to access some of the Google Scholar results by adding the QUT library fulltext finder to my Google Scholar preferences.  A couple of relevant hits (that were not available through the QUT library) required subscription/payment and I therefore, did not access these.

I am keen to compare these results to the information I find in a database search.