Education, learning and teaching

Planning your search

Try not to search your entire question at once. This won't find many useful results. The techniques below can help you plan your search.

Finding keywords

Start by breaking your question down into individual ideas and terms - we call these keywords.

Example: The impact of a flipped classroom approach on student engagement

From here, highlight what you think are the key words or concepts.

• Flipped classroom
• Student engagement

Once you have your keywords, take a moment to decide if there are other words or phrases that mean the same thing (synonyms). Not all authors use the same words to describe the same ideas.

If you're stuck, try Googling the term and seeing what comes up. You can look for words that mean the same thing, more specific terms or broader terms.

• Flipped classroom: active learning, blended learning, constructivism, Padlet (example of flipped classroom software)
• Student engagement: student satisfaction, student participation, student success, student motivation

Other ideas for keywords

• Abbreviations and acronyms - HE, higher education
• British and American spellings - behaviour, behavior
• Terms which can be written as one or two words - timeframe, time frame

Use limits and filters

There are millions of books, articles and websites available, and you won't have time to look through all of them. To help with this, you can decide on limits to your search. This can include:

• Publication date - depending on your topic, you may only want the most recent information available. 
• Language - you can limit your search to specific languages.
• Geography - you may only want research from or about a certain place.
• Sector - you can look at specific sectors such as the public sector or private sector, or industries such as healthcare or retail.

Information sources

For this topic, you might be interested in the following types of information:

• Theories around active learning and constructivism
• Journal articles reporting the results of studies on flipped classrooms
• Blog posts from academics discussing their experiences of flipped classrooms

This is not a comprehensive list. Our Information sources page has more detail on this.

Choosing your own topic?

If you have chosen your own topic, it's important to start with some general searches to make sure there is information out there before you finalise it. If the topic is very specific or new, you may struggle to find enough information. If your topic is too broad, you will find too much information.