I have decided today to focus my search on finding information sources that contain information about science based inquiry learning. This is because I have no information focusing specifically on science and I feel as though this information would be helpful as my ILA is based on science.
The first search term that I entered into Google was ‘inquiry based learning + science + early childhood.’ I was madly hoping that I would find relevant hits as previously my first search term often retrieved irrelevant sources. However I was in luck as this search term retrieved 156 000 results and on the first page of results, many of the hits appeared to be relevant to my topic. After this search term retrieved numerous useful and relevant sources I am feeling more confident in my searching abilities.
I then decided to try and refine my search results as I felt I might have too many hits and many of these could be irrelevant. So then I clicked on the pages from Australia link to see what difference this would make to my hits. I noticed a dramatic change as my hits had been reduced to 8 310. Scrolling down my first page of results I noticed that most of the hits were related to studying an Early Childhood degree at different Universities. I found this to be rather puzzling that just by modifying the location of the results could change the content of the hits so dramatically.
Next I decided to try Google Wonder wheel to see what other relevant search terms it could find for me. The wonder wheel identified four different subject terms and three of these could be useful. I had never thought of adding kindergarten, preschool or children to the end of my search string instead of Early Childhood. I then clicked on the time line link to see when the information relating to my search string was created. Not surprisingly most information was created during the 200’s. My thinking is that this could have occurred due to the increased usage of the internet but I could be wrong. One thing that did surprise me is that there was a spike of information during 2005 and this significantly dropped in 2006. Now I am curious as to why this is.
One thing that has become apparent to me recently is that during my initial searches of this topic I believe I was conducting more A category searches as I was mainly searching for facts (Limberg, 2000). I believe now that I have moved toward C category searching as when I locate a relevant source I closely examine the source to determine its credibility (Limberg, 2000). I also am seeking to find information that provides different perspectives and models of inquiry based learning.
A print screen shot of my first search.
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