Looking for articles on a particular philosophy of education

April 19, 2008 2:25 PM

I'm writing a monstrous paper on the "cross-curricular" teaching method for middle school and high school. I have searched ERIC, JSTOR, and psycINFO with all kinds of keyword combos, and I'm still not coming up with decent theoretical or empirical articles. I really need the help of the Collective BrainFilter. I'll explain further inside...

This philosophy of this method suggests that relating the subject matter you teach (math, history, etc.) to other subjects that the students are studying (literature, science, etc.) and to the "real world" (current events, local news) is a smarter way of teaching than simply concentrating on your subject and your subject alone I can't find anything that explains *why* this theory is a good one; it feels like common sense, but I need to back that up with articles. It's a theory discussed and practiced in many schools, but as far as I can find, there's no data on why we should teach this way -- why it's positive, why it's better than not, etc. I'm looking for both empirical, peer-reviewed studies, and/or articles on the theory itself ("theory suggests that..."). I'm at a loss. Why did I think grad school was a good idea, again?

posted by tzikeh to education (10 comments total)

Since IANAE (educator), this only gets to the mechanics of searching in the databases you mention, but it might help you.

Forget keywords for the time being. I'm assuming "cross-curricular" is the best term for the teaching method you describe.

First off, click on the database's "Advanced Search" tab/button. Then in the search fields, type "cross curric*" AND education (keep the quotation marks and capitalization just I have them, and you might need to replace the '*' with a '?' depending on which database you're using). in the pull-down menu next to the search field, choose 'subject.'

If you get no hits, keep the search terms as they are and choose either 'title' or 'abstract' in the pull-down menu. I got 190 hits searching ERIC and Academic Search Elite in conjunction this way; the first article on the list was entitled "From rhetoric to reality: advancing literacy by cross-curricular means." Once you find a good possibility like this one, click on the citation to go into the record for the article. Then scroll down and see what subject and/or descriptor terms are used for such an article. In the case of this article, it appears that
CURRICULUM planning
EDUCATION -- Curricula
and
INTERDISCIPLINARY approach in education
will all be useful subject headings to search under. But here's the real clue in this record: one of the author-supplied keywords (they're kind of the author's custom-made subject headings) is "cross-curricularity." That's a term worth searching under, and one that you might have not thought of before.

If you kind of extrapolate from here, you'll likely find some good solid stuff. It's kind of the old "using what you know [an established subject heading, author-supplied keyword, or author's name] to discover what you don't know." Kind of a stepping-stone method.

Good luck, and feel free to MeFiMail me if you get stuck.
posted by Rykey at 2:54 PM on April 19 [1 favorite]

Here's a more complete citation for that article I used as an example, by the way:

From rhetoric to reality: advancing literacy by cross-curricular means. By: Alexander, Joy; Walsh, Patrick; Jarman, Ruth; McClune, Billy. Curriculum Journal, Mar2008, Vol. 19 Issue 1, p23-35

Hope this gets you pointed in the right direction :)
posted by Rykey at 2:57 PM on April 19

Oh yeah, one more thing and then I'll shut up: on the search screen, you should be able to scroll down and check a box to limit to scholarly/peer-reviewed sources.
posted by Rykey at 3:00 PM on April 19

I looked on Proquest and EBSCO, but could not see a whole lot of academic (as distinct from magazine-chatty) papers either. Google brings up a lot of citations if you know where to look. Try this Google search "cross-curricular teaching method site:.edu."
There are a couple of useful sites that I found when looking for a similar topic. Try WEBSITES: for cross-curricular teaching (scroll down until you see this heading). There is a discussion with quite a good lit. review in this paper on cross-curricular instruction.
posted by sgmax at 3:22 PM on April 19

Yeah - the limit checkbox isn't all that useful this time, because the theoretical articles I'd like to find don't have to be peer-reviewed, so I don't want to exclude them.

Man, you'd think this wouldn't be so hard to find stuff for.
posted by tzikeh at 3:23 PM on April 19

Try also "Rich Tasks", "Transdisciplinary", "joint curriculum", integration, "authentic learning". There's a chapter (10) in Teaching Middle Years (Pendergast & Bahr) which talks about integrating the curriculum and refers to a number of authors, Habermas 1971, Venville et al, 1999, 2002, Davis et al 2000, Beane, 1996, Shulman & Sherin, 2004. The book is an Australian book, and the authors also Australian, but when you read their articles, their references will include authors from the US.
posted by b33j at 3:38 PM on April 19

have you tried google scholar?

And, my all time favorite method is using the bibliography of papers you already know are useful. however, this only gets you stuff that was written before the papers you already have.

Another thing is you can check who has cited the papers you already possess.
posted by bilabial at 3:44 PM on April 19

The Middle Years International Baccalaureate Program uses many of the concepts that you write about. They have some research information on their website...
posted by ms.v. at 4:30 PM on April 19

Mrs. Plinth and I both taught and the magic catch phrase that was used in our district was interdisciplinary lessons or lesson planning. I can't provide you with studies that back it up, only that the district was in love with the concept, but in reality it was very difficult to get the timing right.
posted by plinth at 5:34 PM on April 19

My killer strategy for fields where I don't have an inroad: Search on terms that are too general and then scan the results for anything vaguely related.

Put those in your list of sources to check. When you get one, read the abstract and decide if it's any good. But then raid its citations for all they're worth.

If you see a paper or an author more than once in several such searches, go find out who else cited it and/or plug it into Google Scholar, and if not, at least the titles will tell you if there's any keyword you didn't guess. In fact, if an author comes up often, just plain Google them and see if they've got a site or been mentioned in conference proceedings or something.

Also worth trying: If a journal comes up often enough in all of this, or has an interesting enough title, go to the stacks, browse nearby, grab the last two-three issues of anything that looks promising and check their tables of contents. Again, you're looking for authors and terminology as well as articles themselves.

/grad student, finished three term papers this week, not sure why he thought it a good idea either :-)
posted by eritain at 10:55 PM on April 19 [1 favorite]