Competency 6: Specific Facet First on JStor

Searching 4 of 4

For the fourth searching task, I chose to use specific facet with JStor.

Naive Question: "I'm doing a study on teacher preparation programs and their implications and effects on teacher quality. Can you help me find some research on this?"

Facet 1: teacher preparation programs. I used the 'full-text' default search option since there are no subject headings. I located the following records for my facet and synonyms:
"teacher preparation programs" (1051 records)
"teacher training" (23555 records)
"teacher certification" (2188 records)
"student teachers" (5240 records)

Facet 2: teacher quality
"teacher quality" (1126 records)
"teacher effectiveness" (1903 records)
"quality teachers" (505)

For my specific facets, I chose to use "quality teachers" AND "teacher preparation programs" for my first search using the 'full-text' default. I retrieved 39 hits. Several of which are relevant or worth perusing:

Citations:
Zientek, L.R. (Dec. 2007). Preparing high-quality teachers: Views from the classroom. American Educational Research Journal, 44 (4), 959-1001.

Boyd, D., Goldhaber, D., Lankford, H., & Wyckoff, J. (Spring 2007). The effect of certification and preparation on teacher quality. The Future of Children, 17 (1), 45-68.

Bain, C. (May 2004). Today's student teachers: Prepared to teach versus suited to teach? Art Education, 57 (3), 42-47.

Hoffman, J.V. (Jan.-Mar. 2004). Review: Essay book review: Achieving the goal of a quality teacher of reading for every classroom: Divest, test, or invest? Reading Research Quarterly, 39 (1), 119-128.

I was happy with these results, but also wanted to see if I could have higher recall. I chose to conduct another search, only using subjects with higher individual results.

Second search (using 'full-text'): "teacher training" AND "teacher effectiveness"
Record retrieval was 534. This yielded a higher return, however once I started browsing, I noticed the results weren't as precise. The records in this search, at least on the first few pages, dealt with education training in other countries. If the patron wasn't concerned about country, then this would provide more records to sift through.

Reflection
After some unsuccessful attempts with this database, this search question seemed to work better than my previous tries. I was able to identify and explore more facets that also, when combined, produced desirable results. JStor seems to be an appropriate database to find articles within research journals that databases such as ERIC or WorldCat likely do not hold.