Educational Tests and Assessment Resource Guide

Conjuctions or Boolean Operators help broaden or narrow your subject when searching.

• And: Narrow your search by looking for one term AND another. Example: "dogs and cats" results will have both dogs and cats together.
• Or: Expand your search to combine one term or another. Example: "dogs or cats" results will have one term or another.
• Not:Limit your search by looking for one term, but not the other. Example: "dogs not cats" will only have dogs, not cats included.

Use double quotation marks to search for an exact phrase.  Example: "acid rain".

Keyword searches will result in articles wherever that word appears whether in the title, abstract, or full text.

Subject searches will search only the subject field, which results in more specific articles.  The subject search uses a controlled vocabulary, so a thesaurus may be helpful.

You can use a keyword search to begin your search.  Then look at the article results for the subject terms used.  You can select the subject terms to narrow your search.

Some possible keywords to use: Tests, Testing, Evaluation, Diagnosis, "Ability testing"

Some possible subject terms to use: Achievement tests, Criterion-referenced tests, Norm-referenced tests, Examinations, Educational tests and measurements, Educational evaluation.

Limiters allow you to narrow the resources you want to include in your search. Some examples of limiters are:

•    full text
•    publication date
•    peer or scholarly journals
•    material type (book, article, newspaper)
•    language
•    images

Type the subject words in the search boxes and use the drop down boxes to choose which fields and conjuctions for your search.

Wildcard and Truncation Symbols help you search for variations of words. Check with the help in the database to find the symbols you need.

• Example: The wildcard is often a question mark ? or a pound sign #. ne?t will find citations containing neat, next or next.
• Example: Truncation is represented with the asterisk *.  Comput* will find words such as computer or computing.