Indigenous Health Assignment

MBBS I

Last updated August 2009 by Mick Draper

Discuss the significance of school retention in Australia for indigenous
students:

What are the current rates of school retention for indigenous students
and how do they compare with retention rates of the 1990s?

The Stats
Use The Australian Bureau of Statistics site.
Right click on the link above to open the site in a new window (or new tab)

Begin with the search box in the top right of the ABS screen.

I suggest that you enter
aboriginal school retention

Then click on the GO button.

Click on what appears to be the latest relevant bulletin.

This will take you to the Summary site.

Here you'll find stats and some interpretation of the stats.
You can click on Downloads to get a pdf of the document

Click on Explanatory Notes to find what's meant by Apparent retention rates

Click on Past & Future Releases to see earlier stats and so find out what retention numbers were in the 1990's.

Now go back to the list of documents found by your search.
Click on the link to

1136.0 - A Directory of Education and Training Statistics, 2009

Under Contents (left hand side bar) click on Indigenous Education and Training Statistics Contents

You can follow some of these links to find other material.

Try a search on schools australia

Click on Summary to read the main thrust of the first document.

Finding other material
Next we'll prepare to look at databases to find journal articles and other material that might help with finding information on retention rates in Australia.

Logic Grids

Write down the concepts that you are looking for.
Underneath each concept write down any synonyms or alternative terms.

In most databases you can use truncation. This allows you to search a range of terms that have the same word stem.
A search on aborigin* where the * is the truncation symbol will find
aborigine OR aborigines OR aboriginal OR aboriginality etc

The Logic Grid can be abbreviated to

Terms that are in the same column are linked by OR logic.
Terms in different columns are linked by AND logic.

Informit Health
On the Library Home site, click on Databases.

Click on Health Sciences.

Scroll down the list of databases and click on Informit Health.

To add education databases to the ones selected here click on Change Databases.

Scroll down and click in the boxes next to A+ Education, and AEI-ATSIS - Australian Education Index – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Subset.

Click on one of the Continue buttons.
This returns you to the search screen.

Now you can enter the terms from your logic grid.
Type in the terms from your first logic grid column into the first search box.
Remember that terms in the same column are joined by or.

Next type the terms from the second column into the second search box.
Then the terms from the third column into the third search box.
You may have to click on + Add more terms to get the third search box.
Click on the Search button.

Because you are searching several independent databases you might find duplicate records.
You just need to be aware of these.

Most citations have direct links to full text.

You can sort your results by latest date first [default], database, title, author etc

If you can't find a full text icon then click on the Check fulltext options icon.

Critically discuss government policies which are aimed at enhancing indigenous
school retention, including those for remote areas.

For this part of the assignment just add an extra term to include policies.

You can search for indigenous on the Federal Dept of Health and Ageing web site

Or look at the Indigenous education publication profiles on the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations website.

Does secondary and higher education play a key role in creating a healthy
population?

You can continue to use the same databases you've selected to find sources on this question.

What will your logic grid look like?

Have a go at writing your logic grid now.
The first column will be the same but the other concepts are different.
Notice that I've put phrases such as "high school" in double quotes.
This ensures that the term is searched as a phrase rather than as high AND school.
Notice too that I haven't used the truncation "high school*" to search for the singular and plural forms of the term.
Informit doesn't allow truncation within quotes.

What other terms can you add to columns 2 and 3 of YOUR logic grid to give yourself the best chance of finding citations to relevant items?

Don't scroll down until you've had a go yourself

Here is a grid but not al the possible terms are included

There are probably a lot more terms you could put into the third column such as drug* alcohol diabetes etc

Now to put these into the Informit search boxes.
Or not!

Because when you do you'll find thousands of citations.
I suggest that you make your search more specific by searching some terms only in specific fields.

You might like to restrict aborigin* or indigenous just to the subject fields.

Do the same with the education part of the search.

Use AND to join these two subject searches.
Click on the Search button and run this search even though you haven't added the third column terms yet.

The next bit is a bit trickier.

I searched the terms from the third column in the title OR in the abstract of citations.
I did this search separately from the subject search above.

I clicked on the link to Manage Search History.

Next I combined these two separate searches using AND logic.
I also limited the range of publication dates from 2005 to 2009, but you can use whatever range of dates you think are appropriate.

How to read an article.
Here is a brief essay I've written on how to read articles. You may find it useful if you haven't had much experience in critically reading academic material.

Some of you might like to use the PubMed database to find articles published in only the higher profile journals.

PubMed is available from the Library Home

Click on the link to the MeSH database.

MeSH stands for Medical Subject Headings.
MeSH are added to most citations of articles to describe the contents.
If you can find the MeSH that correspond to the concepts you want to search then you should find most of the citations in PubMed that are of interest.

The main concepts are Australian aboringinals, Education, and Health

Try entering the first of these concepts into the MeSH Database search box.

This produces a very strange result.

The subject heading for aborigines turns out to be Oceanic Ancestry Group.
This is OK but it also includes people groups other than Australian Aborigines.
Nevertheless we want to incorporate this subject heading into our search.
Click in the box to the left of the MeSH

A tick appears in the box to show that you've selected it.
Now click on the Send to box>
A drop down menu appears.
Click on Search Box with AND.

Now we have to restrict the search to Australia instead of all the Oceanic groups.
Clear the MeSH search box (not the PubMed Search Box) and type australia.
Click on Go

.

Click in the box to the left of Australia.
Click on the Send to box.
Click on Search Box with AND.

Now do the same thing using Education in the MeSH Search box.

Finally search for health in the MeSHSearch box.
You should end up with something like this.

Click on the Search PubMed button.

Now your search will move from the MeSH database to PubMed.
You will be presented with citations to articles that have all of the these subject headings.

Click in the Display box.
A drop down menu appears.
Click on Abstract or AbstractPlus.

The Abstract/AbstractPlus views allow you to see Uni of Adelaide Online icons to link to the full text of articles.

If there isn't a Uni of Adelaide online icon you may still be able to view the article.
If you are at Uni then you can click on the publisher's icon and this might take you to the full text.
If you are asked for a password then you won't be able to see the full text here.

If you still want to view the article, or if there is no publisher full text icon it's worth looking for the name of the journal in the library catalogue.

Before searching the Catalogue make sure you have the full journal title.
To find this point your cursor at the abbreviated journal title but don't click.
The full title of the journal will appear for about 10 seconds

Using the Catalogue to find info

You can use Guided Keyword searching

If you are familiar with using Keyword (use and, or, not, " ")
you can search someithing like

(aborigin? or indigenous) and (health? or wellbeing or "well being") and (educat? or schools?)