Hot Topics This Semester

Many of our students completed library information literacy workshops this semester. We asked students to choose a sample topic to demonstrate their search strategy skills. Here is a graphic representation, or tag cloud, that shows the 50 most popular words compiled from the all of their responses:

abortion abuse advertising affect age care cars cell cheating child childhood children college control dangers death dogs drinking driving drug drunk eating education effects exercise games gas global gun influence music obesity penalty pregnancy punishment research schools smoking stem teen teenage television topic underage video violence violent warming women world

created at TagCrowd.com

(Note that the words that appear largest in the cloud are the words that appeared in students' responses the most often.)

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