Course resource help for Education and Early Years/Early Childhood Studies

If you’re not sure where to start reading for any assignment, remember your module will have a reading list. 

Your lecturer will have recommended books, journal articles and maybe web sites, and may have marked which ones are Essential or Recommended. Sometimes they will have set specific reading for each week of the module. Your reading lists should be linked from the module’s Moodle course. 

You can also find them on our Reading Lists search (look up the module code, module title or lecturer’s name)

Find out more from our video How to find your reading list

You can find all our print books and e-books by using the “Books and e-books” tab on LibrarySearch, or doing a general search first and then filtering your results to Books and e-books.

We have hundreds of core textbooks for Education available as e-books.

In some cases you can download the whole e-book to a laptop or tablet for a limited number of days; in others, you can print or download very limited numbers of pages. Our e-book packages also let you add your own online notes to a book or make lists of your favourite e-books.

Follow these instructions to search for and access e-books. If you prefer to follow a printed guide, you can download our E-books for Education students guide (Word and PDF available) and work through that.

Find out what’s new on our New Books in Education and Early Childhood Studies reading list.

If you already know the details of a specific journal article you want to read, you can often find it by pasting the title into LibrarySearch (on the default general search tab). 

If you want to look up the title of a whole journal (eg British Educational Research Journal), either just to browse or to look up a specific article you know is in it, use the Journal Titles tab on LibrarySearch. Use the 'Using LibrarySearch to find a journal title' guide to help you.

If you need to find out what journal articles have been written on a topic, you can start with LibrarySearch. Put in keywords for your topic, then when you get the results refine them to Format - Article. You can also refine to Year - eg Last 10 years - and Peer Reviewed (under Content Type). Use the 'Using LibrarySearch to find journal articles on a topic' guide to help you.

If your LibrarySearch results aren’t relevant enough or you don’t find enough, you can use our specialist Education databases, below, to search for journal articles. All these databases will require you to use your Oxford Brookes login to access them. 

You'll need to plan your database search carefully - use our 'finding journal articles' worksheet to help you. You can also check our slides on finding journal articles and research for Education, "Where's the Evidence?"

• One-stop search: Search all the Education databases at once. (Bear in mind this includes ERIC, so will get you a lot of US literature as well as British and European: but it is a quick and easy way to start.)
• British Education Index: Covers mostly British and European Education journals, as well as some research reports and conference papers. Lots of the articles (not all) have the full text available.
• Child Development and Adolescent Studies: Key database for Early Years/Early Childhood Studies including development, behaviour, psychiatry and psychology.
• Education Abstracts: Content on a wide array of subject areas including adult education, comparative education, government funding, higher education, school administration and teacher evaluation. Despite the name it does have full text available for many articles.
• Educational Administration Abstracts: Covers areas related to educational administration, including educational leadership, educational management, and educational research. Despite its name, many articles are available full-text.
• ERIC: American based education database sponsored by the US Department of Education. ERIC includes coverage of journal articles, conferences, and books, mostly but not exclusively about American education. The current US administration is reducing the total number of journals indexed in ERIC by up to 45% from April 2025.

• Academic Search Complete: useful for students interested in English as a second language, particularly for Applied Linguistics.
• A-n The Artists’ Information Company: Valuable resource for Artist Teachers: provides access to research, critical writings, artists' profiles, debates and opportunities in the visual arts as well as a series of open interactive websites.
• Art Full Text: Useful for Artist Teachers: a key source for the visual arts; other subjects covered include design, architecture, fashion, film and video.
• Bibliography of the History of Art: Useful for Artist Teachers; more art historical in focus, but does cover modern and contemporary art. Indexes articles published between 1975 and 2008.
• Communication & Mass Media Complete: Useful for students interested in English as a second language; covers language and linguistics, as well as other subjects such as advertising, broadcasting, communication, cultural studies, film, journalism & mass media
• MLA International Bibliography: Useful for students interested in English as a second language; covers literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory and literary criticism
• Emerald: Useful for Leadership & Management; academic and theoretical articles on management and business.
• MEDLINE: Biomedical coverage including psychology. Useful for Special Educational Needs.
• PsycINFO: Useful for Childhood & Youth Studies, Literacy Difficulties and Special Educational Needs; all aspects of psychology, including child development and educational psychology.

If you are researching a topic which goes beyond Education, also check out the Course Resource Help pages in that subject area, eg Psychology, Fine Art, Social Sciences or Management.

• All our children’s books and classroom resources from the Primary Teaching Collection are on LibrarySearch.
• To focus on these resources, run your search and then use the options on the left to filter the results to Primary Teaching Collection (under Library). Click 'Retain filters' to keep this setting for your next search.
• You can search for children’s books just like any other books, for example dahl charlie chocolate factory
• To find non-fiction children’s books or resources on a topic, such as weather, search for weather and use the options on the left to filter the results to Primary Teaching Collection.
• To find dual language children’s books (which have the same story in two languages, eg English and Spanish), search for dual language
• To find Big Books (large-format picture books for showing to a whole class at once) search for “children’s big book” (with the quotation marks)
• To find resource packs on a topic, such as Islam, search for "resource pack" islam (with the quotation marks)
• To find non-book resources on a topic, such as money, search for money, filter your results to Primary Teaching Collection and then use te Format option to narrow your search further, eg to Image (for posters), Object, Kit etc
• You can also search for a specific item, eg tambourine or gruffalo puppet.
• We have recommended reading guides for children of all ages - on our Reading Lists Search look for reading guide

Find out what’s new on our New Resources in the Primary Teaching Collection reading list

Find links to these on our Key Education organisations and Web sites reading list

Check out the Statistics section of our Key Education organisations and Web sites reading list - includes UK, international and historical Education statistics