Wading through the plethora of educational sites available on the web can be a daunting task. Will the time spent looking for a valuable resource be rewarded by a trove of great ideas, literature, and activities? Or, will the end result be hours of frustration, and a reluctance to look online again? A quick search with Google Scholar linked me to ERIC.ed.gov, the acronym for which represents Education Resources Information Center.
What a find ERIC turned out to be! There are myriad searchable categories, as well as a search engine for the site. I tried “building vocabulary” and was rewarded with results for 60 scholarly articles and papers, for many of which ERIC has free full text availability. “Analytical thinking” yielded 558 results, 181 of which could be seen in full text for free. Obviously, analytical thinking is a very broad category. The search can be easily narrowed to focus on year, year range, type of publication, and extra keywords. This is a nice tool for the searcher who realizes that he doesn’t have time to wade through 181 articles, especially if some of them will touch his area of interest only tangentially.
The main benefit the site offers is an easy search for specific questions. The results that come back are from credible sources. Academic research findings and theory are quickly located for queries, and the ability to modify by time frame and article type steers searches to keep them closer to the originally intended target. The downside to ERIC is that it covers more of the theoretical than the practical realm. For a new teacher looking for lesson plans or even ideas for a given subject, it is absolutely not a valuable site. However, to find the basis and roots for certain practices it is quite valuable. The information available is credible, current, and precise; as such, ERIC is quite the valuable educational website.
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