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EDUC BC3032: Investigating the Purposes and Aims of Education

Prof. Erika Kitzmiller, Fall 2020 Term B

Using ERIC to research educational policy

ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is an online library of education research and information sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education, and contains citations, abstracts, and full-text for articles in education periodicals and other publications. 

  • ERIC is freely available for anyone to search from the U.S. Department of Education. It's also available through library subscriptions to EBSCOHost and ProQuest, but I find that it is easiest to see the policies referred to in the results at eric.ed.gov.
  • You might also need to search for the full text of the content in CLIO and/or Educat to locate the material in the Columbia Libraries collections.
  • One potentially useful filter for educational policy research is the "laws, policies, and programs" identifier and the many policy-related descriptors. 
  • Learn more about the site's advanced search options.
  • Want to learn more? Check out the ERIC training videos such as How ERIC Can Help You Write a Research Paper. 

Additional education literature databases

Search tips

  • If you know exactly what book (journal, video, etc.) you are looking for, you can search by Title, Author, ISBN, etc.
  • To find items about a specific topic, first try a keyword search in All Fields.
    • Use "quotation marks" to search for an exact phrase: "Morningside Heights" 
    • Use * for truncation (to find variant spellings and endings of a word): wom*n will find woman, women, womyn; activis* will find activism, activist, activists, etc.
    • For more complex search, use AND and OR:
      • AND finds records which have all the search terms you entered.
      • OR finds records which have one of the search terms you entered, as well as records which have more than one of the terms. OR finds MORE.
    • ​Use parentheses to group terms:  ("Morningside heights" OR Harlem") AND (education OR school*)
  • If you find an article or a book that is relevant, the bibliography/works cited page can be a useful road map to other relevant literature that was previously published.  
  • If you find an article or a book that is relevant, you can use Google Scholar and some other databases to find out whether it was cited by other scholars after it was published. Search for the title of an article/monograph and search and click on "Cited by" to generate a list of publications that have referenced that source.
  • In many databases, you can narrow your results to scholarly publications only. Look for "limit to ... scholarly publications/peer-reviewed/refereed publications only" or similar language. This will help you find articles from journals that have gone through a rigorous peer review process.