EED 610: Research in Elementary Education

What is ERIC?

ERIC (Education Resource Information Center) is an online database that contains

• more than 1.6 million records and links to  more than 631,000 full-text documents
• records for a variety of source types, including journal articles, books, conference papers, curriculum guides, policy papers and more
• an education-specific thesaurus containing over 11,700 terms

How do I access ERIC?

You can use three versions of ERIC.  All provide access to the same data, but their interfaces are different.   ERIC (EBSCO) and ERIC (ProQuest) are by subscription. ERIC (U.S. Department of Education) links to the freely available version of ERIC.

Finding Empirical Research in ERIC

ERIC does not have a simple method to locate empirical research. Using "empirical" as a keyword will find some studies, but miss others. One technique is to search for "Research Reports". Use the Advanced Search. Type keywords into search boxes. Under More Search Options, see Document Type and choose Reports: Research

An alternative is to use terminology recommended by the ERIC thesaurus. Some useful keywords are:

• Action Research
• Case Studies
• Ethnography
• Evaluation Methods
• Evaluation Research
• Experiments
• Focus Groups
• Field Studies
• Interviews
• Mail Surveys
• Mixed Methods Research
• Naturalistic Observation
• Participant Observation
• Participatory Research
• Qualitative Research
• Questionnaires
• Research
• Statistical Analysis
• Statistical Studies
• Telephone Surveys