The Quest on Questia

Questia is (apparently) the world's largest online library, which provides access to academic resources including books, encyclopedias, articles and journals. It was purchased by our College at the beginning of this year for all Year 6 - 12 students as a subscription, so all students had access to a more 'academic' bank of resources.


This extensive database certainly meets the demand of academic materials required for our Senior Years students, however it is most certainly not useful for the younger years. After almost completing my research for the ILA, I thought Questia may provide some resources to aid my own learning at tertiary level.


http://www.questiaschool.com


The school subscription for this database gives all staff their own logon and password and hosts such features as searching the library, creating bookshelves to store resources for personal use and student access, housing lessons plans and assessments, managing and checking student access, using lexiles and creating citations.


Questia is searched through in much the same manner as Google and Google Scholar, using Boolean search terms in quotation marks.


I began my searching with the broad term - "Guided Inquiry"- This search led me to over 35,000 resources - eeek!


I then moved onto the search terms - "Inquiry in education" - This once again led me to far too many results to sift through (48,876)


From here I narrowed my boolean search terms to "Inquiry Learning" and "Primary Education" - This result gave me 144 results (books, articles and journals), however the when reading through these resources they tended to still remain quite broad, general and philosophical. 


Finally, I used the terms "Inquiry Learning" and "Primary Teaching" - This gave me 17 results, three of which I added to my Learning Nexus Bookshelf, to be read through in more detail, in preparation for Part B of the ILA Task.

I would highly recommended a subscription to this database for Teacher-Librarians in a secondary or tertiary setting. The resources available provide the users with a broad academic range of resources to access in their full text (as opposed to snippets) whilst not having to physically visit a public/state library. It is a wonderful resource for schools and universities in remote areas or with limited funding.