In my search of the A+ Education database I found that even quite a general search returned few results. The A+ Education database searches as a whole phrase unless the Boolean operator AND is placed between search terms. My first search using the A+ Education database returned only 19 results when I used (primary science) AND (inquiry). I am aware that when I use AND I narrow the search and that by using the Boolean operator OR I would have returned more results but the results would not contain the information I was after. Using OR is best when there is more than one term for a word. Primary science and inquiry do not have the same definition therefore by placing OR between the two terms I would not find results containing information on both topics. I could have narrowed my search using the 'subject headings' on the right hand side of the page but as I had few results returned in the first case, this was not necessary. Quality is more important than quantity and I found 8 of the entries to be useful to my topic.
In the past I have used this database and have been more successful at returning a greater number of results. Perhaps this database has few articles relating to science in particular. I found reading the blurb about the different databases located in the library of QUT to be useful when I initially chose databases to search but some of the databases that I chose contained far more useful articles relating to my current topic.
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