Step by Step with Professional Development Collection

EBSCO Professional Development Collection is a database that offers a large number of full text articles on nearly every subject related to education. This handout takes you step by step through both basic and advanced searching.

1. Before you touch the keyboard, think carefully about your topic. Most topics for college level papers have two main ideas in them. If your topic does not have two ideas, then you may want to narrow it down. A good example of a paper topic is: using manipulatives to teach mathematics.
   
   The main ideas in this topic are: mathematics and manipulatives. To put these ideas together in a way that EBSCO Professional Development Collection understands, your search statement becomes: manipulatives AND mathematics. The AND is not a word but a logical operator that tells the computer to look for all articles that deal with both manipulatives and mathematics. Here is how EBSCO Professional Development Collection sees your search statement. The overlap between the circles is your search results.

And here is the search box for Professional Development Collection.




2. To search EBSCO Professional Development Collection scroll down to the Databases A-Z list on the library web page.



3. Select P and scroll down to the database.

EBSCO Professional Development Collection Advanced Search

If you are visually oriented, want more space and flexibility, or plan to try several related searches, then EBSCO's Advanced Searchis for you.

1. Instead of using an AND between ideas in a search statement, in Advanced Search, you fill separate rows with your ideas, one row per idea.


2. You can also put two or more synonyms for one idea together using OR, a logical operator joins synonyms as a single idea.


3. In Advanced Search, fill in the multibox. Select Full Txt, and click Search.