PsycINFO

About PsycINFO:

PsycINFO provides a highly specialized collection of peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health.  It contains abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books and dissertations from the American Psychological Association.¹   Furthermore, since this database also contains international journals users can gain a world view of Psychology.   

Search Query:

• Is there a correlation between students that are identified as having a learning disability and the high school dropout rate

• (Due to the content of this database I do not feel that I need to adjust my search query.)

Search 1- I created this concept analysis for my search using natural language: 

	Facet 1	Facet 2
Concept	high school dropout rate	learning disability

Boolean search statement using natural language:

Hits = (learning disabilities and high school dropout rate)

1 hit was recalled.   

This search result is not relevant to the original search query because the article is about identifying postsecondary interventions that postsecondary institutions can utilize to support this increasing population of students. 

Since this database did not support a natural language search, I searched the database thesaurus for relevant subject headings.  Using the terms in the concept analysis I searched for the best subject heading terms in the database thesaurus.

I found the following subject terms:

	Facet 1	Facet 2
Concept	high school dropout rate	learning disability
Subject Heading	*School Graduation  *High School Graduates	learning disorder

I then conducted a Specific Facet First search using the following strategy.

• Set 1 = school graduation or high school graduates
• Set 2 = learning disorder
• Hits = su: (school graduation or high school graduates) and su: (learning disorder)

This search did not yield any results.  This was a troubling finding since I tested both sets prior to conducting the specific facet search and found the following results:  learning disorder yield 2305 hits and school graduation or high school graduates yield 1184 hits. 

I conducted a third search using the Specific Facet First search strategy using the following term set:

• Set 1 = school graduation or high school graduates
• Set 2 = learning disabilities
• Hits = (school graduation or high school graduates) and (learning disabilities)

This search resulted in 51 hits. 

After examining the result list I came to the conclusion that many of the hits were irrelevant because the titles and partial abstract pertained to what happens to student who graduate from high school with a learning disability.  I want to know how learning disabilities impact the high school graduation rate.  Therefore, I added the age limiter of adolescents (13-17 yrs).  This limiter reduced the result list to 22 hits.  These articles appeared to be more relevant to my original query.  However, none of the articles directly examined the correlation between the high school dropout rate and learning disabilities.  

What I learned: Content

While these articles do not show a correlation between the graduation rate and learning disabilities, they do highlight how different the education of student with learning disabilities is from that of students without learning disabilities.  One article noted that because these students do not take the same college readiness courses as students without these diagnoses, they are not ready to make the transition and require additional assistance from the higher education institutes which they attend.     

What I learned: Searching

When a database uses controlled vocabulary, one of the ways to discover if the database is relevant to your query is to test for specificity and exhaustivity.   Specificity means the extent to which a concept or topic is identified by a precise term in the hierarchy of its genus/species relationship.  This database’s thesaurus produced the search term “learning disorder” for the term “learning disability”.  However, the term “learning disorder” did not produce any results.  Additionally, this database did not contain a search term for the phrase “high school dropout rate” in its thesaurus.  Exhaustivity, is the amount and extent to which an item has search terms attached to it, how comprehensively it is indexed, the extent to which concepts and topics are made retrievable by means of index terms.  This database failed to produce positive results for both these test.  Conducting the specificity and exhaustivity test are normally very reassuring.  Catalogers use controlled vocabulary to assign subject headings to bibliographic records in order to lead users to authorized or related term(s).  One of the advantages of controlled vocabulary is that it saves you time because it creates an artificial language in which all of the items of a particular subject are linked by a designated vocabulary.  The use of controlled vocabulary increases your chances of retrieving relevant items and makes the search more precise.  I believe that failing to find relevant search terms in the thesaurus would normally deter me from continuing a search in the database. That said I believe that had I stopped searching for relevant articles, I would have lost an opportunity to deepen my understanding of the effects of learning disabilities on student’s lives.  As an elementary teacher I saw firsthand how important it is to ensure that students with learning disabilities are identified and placed in the appropriate intervention programs, as early as possible.  However, I never thought that this “label” could later hinder the student’s ability to enroll in classes that will prepare them for college.  

Reflection:
I tested this database for specificity and exhaustivity because, I was surprised that my topic was not covered very well in this database.  I thought that a database that is maintained by the APA would have more information about my topic.  Thus, the results of this search have led me to believe that my topic fits better in the educational industry than the psychology industry.

 

Reference List:

1.    “Databases A-Z List.” Texas Woman’s University. Accessed September 19, 2014. http://www.twu.edu/library/databases-descriptions-a.asp