Research Journal Page 3

You should be keeping track of databases you used, keywords and subject searches, the process you used for finding and gathering articles. You should also make notes of the questions that arise from your readings, concerns you have about methods, ideas you have for further research, etc.
Second journal check will be 3/25

I spent all of my research time in EBSCO database.  I started out using the keywords “youth and reading” and searched all of the databases within EBSCO.  The results came back with a lot of articles about incarcerated youth and how to prevent incarceration by helping youth with reading skills.  I didn’t narrow it down to a full text search or peer reviewed at first.  When I didn’t see what I was looking for, I did another search in EBSCO, utilizing the Boolean operator-“youth” in subject terms and “reading” in subject terms.  I did do a full text search and peer reviewed articles only this time.  This gave me limited results with many of the articles having topics such as guides for teen reading, new titles, teen reading interests, etc.  Since my group is Youth and Reading, I wanted resources that focused more generally on the actual reading habits of teens.  I decided to change my search terms to “teens” and “reading” using the Boolean operator, but did not assign subject or title, etc. to the terms.  I did search all databases for full text articles only.  This is where I was successful in finding a variety of articles on my topic.  I read through many of them online to see which I thought would be the most interesting to read and discuss and picked six, which I then narrowed down to five. 

I was really looking for articles that researched ways to motivate students to read, how to incorporate technology tools, and students’ attitudes towards reading-why do they read?  Exploring this question is difficult since it is such a general topic, but here are a few of the questions that I asked when thinking about why students read- Do students read to validate their lives? To justify/understand their own life experiences? To escape reality?

I found there to be quite a few articles about incorporating tools of technology into the teaching of reading, most significantly, the impact of both author and personal blogs upon teens and reading.  The articles about the blogs are what intrigued me the most.  I could see a strong connection between teens reading and accessing blogs of popular authors.  I agree that this is a way to feed into a reading interest that a teen might have, but it also brought more questions, such as: 

How to use and apply these same resources (of blogs) in the school and public library setting?  How can librarians stay involved in the current trends regarding these types of resources and utilizing this knowledge to serve their teen patrons?

All of these are questions that I hope to explore further at a later time.