Q. peer review articles on working with students with disabilities

Hi

From your email address I am guessing you are not a College of the Mainland student. We are happy to help anyone that contacts us; the only issue is that our databases are restricted to  COM students. However, the instructions I give you can be applied to the databases at your school, if you do attend another college.

If you aren't a COM student, be sure to contact your institution's librarians and ask for assistance. You can still use the tips I provide. 

If you are a COM student, all relevant links will be posted below, and disregard what I wrote above!

Go to our databases guide, linked below. This guide has all our databases organized by topic. Select the Education page. We will start with EBSCO: Academic Search Complete (which should be available at any college). Since you need peer reviewd articles, I adivse you to stay away from ERIC, which provides no way to know if an article is peer-reviewed, and most definitely are not, anyway.

So access the Academic Search Complete link. Your topic as stated is very broad. You might want to narrow it down at some point (what about working with these students interests you?). Also, I am assuming your topic is in the context of teaching students, so that is the search I ran. If it is as a school counselor or social services, you'll want to revise the search accordingly.

I searched the phrase: students with disabilities AND teaching. The capitalized AND tells EBSCO I want it to search for both elements (the students and teaching). 

After you run your search, you will see that we have thousands of results, so we will want to narrow this down, and also limit to peer reviewed articles. All of these limiters are on the left.

First, check the box next to Full Text. Once the results are resorted, check next to References Available (which means the articles will have their own Reference page or Bibliography) and then check next to Scholarly, Peer-Reviewed articles.

Next, if you want more recent articles, you can change the publication date range, which is right under the Full text section.

Once you do that, scroll down until you see the heading: Subject Thesaurus Terms. These are the official EBSCO subject terms. Click the heading to expand. You will see a short list of subject terms, and under them, a small, blue link, "Show More". Click that link. It will bring up a window that shows all the subject terms present in the articles in your result list. Notice the scroll bar on the right.

Start checking next to the boxes that have relevant subjects. Also be mindful of the age of student you mean (elementary, high-school or secondary, college). Once you are finished, hit the yellow update button.

For example, I would definitely select "students with disabilities" since that is one of our main ideas. Because I'm assuming you are asking in the context of teaching, I would also select "teaching methods". There might be several more you want to select.

Once you have your result list, you can scan the article title, summary, and subject terms to determine which articles are appropriate. Once you find one, click the title link to access the detailed record. You will see your full text access options on the left (PDF and/or HTML). Click to access the full article. The tools on the right allow you to print the article, email it to yourself (envelope icon), and get your citation (piece of paper icon). If you want to save the article, go back to the detailed record and select the disk icon.

I've also included links to our How to Use Academic Search Complete and How to Use Research Library guides below for step-by-step instructions and screenshots.