CTE 340W: Research and Development in Career and Technology Education

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Finding the right search terms for your topic can help streamline your research process. Keep in mind that there are many common ways to express subject terms in the field of education. One trick is to find the "official" terms in an article database such ERIC and Education FullText.

The image below shows one of the results for a search in ERIC for the terms: career and technical education AND dropout. Note that there are other related or more specific terms, such as Dropout Prevention, Vocational Education, and Outcomes of Education.

You can combine different combinations of terms, experimenting until you find relevant information.  For example:

• Career Education OR Vocational Education: will return results that include either of those terms.
• Vocational Education AND Dropout Prevention will return only those results that have both these terms.

If you find the "official terms" listed in the Subject field, you can limit a search to only that field. This is one way to get fewer results and ones that are really focused on your topic.

You might have to experiment with using more or fewer search terms and different combinations and limits in order to find the most useful and relevant results.

Once you have run some searches and found useful subject terms, you can limit your results to only scholarly or peer-reviewed publication and by date. The limit options are on the left side of the screen for both ERIC and Education FullText.

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