Hot Topic: Single-Sex Schools

A local hot topic hitting the news in Northeastern Ohio these days is the concept of the single-sex classroom. This fall the Cleveland school district will be creating four single-sex elementary schools, complete with standardized "uniforms" for the district. If you would like to investigate these topics for a research paper or speech topic, here are some ideas on how to get started:

Do a search in our online catalog or in the OhioLINK catalog. The established subject heading is "single sex schools," but you might also want to investigate the concept of "single sex classes" as well. To get a more well-rounded collection of research materials, don't forget to investigate the alternative by doing a search for "coeducation." Performing a word / keyword search will expand your search results to include chapters out of books.

For articles out of magazines and professional journals, try searching the Education Research Complete and ERIC online indexes. Both of these databases focus on the field of education, eliminating the need to weed out articles from other disciplines.

To look at local coverage of the topic, we recommend locating newspaper articles from the region. The Akron Beacon Journal is indexed in our NewsBank Newspaper database, and there are several Northeastern Ohio newspapers, including the Plain Dealer, indexed in the Lexis Nexis Academic database.

To access the periodicial indexes / databases listed above, view UA Libraries alphabetical list of all databases and scroll through the list alphabetically.

Whatever topic you decide to investigate, be sure to ask us if you would like help with your search strategy, from choosing appropriate keywords, putting together a Boolean search, or choosing the right database.

Maureen