Entry 4: Database Search

After my frustrations yesterday and having revisited the project task sheet/criteria and example Project Reports on blackboard, I feel I have a clearer idea of the type of information that I want to source for my literature review - art inquiry models/processes as well as information literacy skills and dispositions fostered through inquiry in the visual arts.  Feeling much more focused, I have decided to do a Database search, beginning with A+ education (since it contains Australian journal content).

In an attempt to save time and to avoid the situation of ‘information overload’ that I found myself in yesterday, I decide to search narrowly first, using very specific search terms and phrases, before broadening my search query.

I use the boolean operators AND and OR, as well as “ ” to search for exact terms as a way of limiting my search results.  I began with the query:

“visual art”

AND

“inquiry learning” OR “inquiry-based learning” OR “guided inquiry”

AND

secondary OR “high school”

This gave me 1 result, which appeared to be a relevant article, but I was unable to access the full text version.  Note to self:  remember to include only results available in full text.

Following this, I tried a number of different search terms.   Given that I had not had much luck finding content-specific visual art resources with exact terms like “inquiry learning” or “inquiry-based learning” in my previous searches, I decided to try ‘inquiry’ with other, more general terms such as ‘education’ ‘learning’ ‘teaching’.  The results of these searches are listed in the table below:

Search query	Results
“visual art” AND “inquiry learning” or “inquiry-based learning” or “guided inquiry”	1
“visual art” AND “inquiry model”	0
“visual art” AND inquiry AND learning or teaching or education or curriculum	6

I was getting very few hits with these search terms (none of which were helpful), so I decided to broaden my search by adding in the word ‘art’.  While the use of ‘art’ opened up thousands upon thousands of irrelevant hits in my Google searches, I figured that the database would offer more limited results and would allow ‘art’ to be picked up in the context of ‘art teacher’ or ‘art student’ or ‘art educator’ and in any instance where the full term “visual art” was not used.

I used the query:

“visual art” or art

AND

inquiry

AND

teaching or learning or education or curriculum

and limited the search to ‘Full Text Records Only’.  This delivered 64 results - a good, manageable number I think.

I accessed and printed full-text copies of 8-10 articles that I thought were pertinent to inquiry learning in Art.

There were also a couple of full-text articles available externally that I was trying to access, but for some reason the link kept saying that it was broken.  I entered the title of one of these articles into Google Scholar on the off-chance that I might be able to find a PDF copy online.  I was unable to find the article I was looking for, but I came across what appeared to be 2 very valuable resources.  One journal article titled:


Goldblatt, P. (2006).  How John Dewey’s Theories Underpin Art and Art Education.  In Education and Culture; 22 (1); pp. 17-34. 


and another:


Chanda, J.  (2007).  Achieving Social and Cultural Educational Objectives through Art Historical Inquiry Practices.  In Journal of Aesthetic Education; 41 (4).  Fulltext available via QUT.

This unintentional/tangent Google Scholar search had paid off!

Perusing through the documents that I had printed or bookmarked, I noticed that a couple of them were written by Susan Wilks.  It appears that Wilks had conducted some extensive research into Art education in schools so I decided to conduct a final search to see if I can find any other articles/research by Wilks that is related to inquiry learning in art.

I use the query:

“visual art” or art

AND

wilks [specifying ‘wilks’ in the AUTHOR field]

This brings up 7 results.  Two of those (titled Only good for the art class...I don’t think so and The visual arts as a thinking tool) that seem to contain highly relevant information and I print these for reading later.

I am feeling very happy about my searching today.  I have come away with what I feel are some highly valuable resources and I feel that my time has been spent wisely.  My database searches have generated results that were much more relevant to my topic and focus and I think the information that I have sourced today will be very useful for my literature review.

REFLECTION

As Kuhlthau's ISP model suggests, I began experiencing a sense of clarity and direction as my perspective became more focused and I was able to conduct searching with clearer intent.  Through this process, I engaged in the various information literacy concepts for locating, evaluating and using information (Kuhlthau 2007, p.77-91).  

Locating:

• chaining was evident as I followed up different author or full-text leads to access relevant information
• I differentiated between sources by weighing up their quality, currency and relevance to determine which were valuable to pursue

Evaluating:

• I was consistently evaluating the worth and merit of the sources I was finding - evaluating author credibility/expertise was important and enabled me to further source other documents that were of quality and currency
• it was also important to evaluate the 'usefulness' of the research for my topic and focus

Using:

• forming and refining a focus was evident as I questioned the direction I wanted to take and determined the importance and relevance of information and sources in relation to the nature of my topic/task - in this way I was able to manage the inquiry (Kuhlthau 2007, p.89).

While the above list provides an example of the information literacy concepts I engaged in throughout one part of the research process, I did not experience  these as separate or isolated skills, but as interwoven and connected processes.  For example: while locating information, evaluation (of credibility and worth) was important and; while reading and using information (through notetaking, interpreting, trying to find a focus, recording references etc), I was continuously evaluating it (to assess its usefulness for my purpose) and using it to further locate other valuable sources.  This experience has enhanced my understanding of information literacy, not as separate or isolated skill sets, but as connected and contextual...as 'using information to learn' (Bruce 2008).