You are overwhelmed by the volume of information available for your thesis on the impact of digital literacy on secondary education outcomes in Pretoria. You have identified several databases filled with relevant research articles but struggle to manage the vast amount of data.

What strategy should you employ to refine your search and manage the information effectively?


Utilise Boolean operators to combine search terms and exclude irrelevant topics, focusing your search on "digital literacy AND secondary education outcomes NOT higher education."


Stick to local sources of information to minimise the volume of literature you haves to review.


Change your thesis topic to a less researched area to avoid dealing with too much information.


Decide to include all topics related to education in your thesis as sub-topics to make sure you do not leave anything important out.

1 answer

To effectively refine your search and manage the information for your thesis on the impact of digital literacy on secondary education outcomes in Pretoria, you should:

Utilise Boolean operators to combine search terms and exclude irrelevant topics, focusing your search on "digital literacy AND secondary education outcomes NOT higher education."

This strategy allows you to narrow down your search results significantly by clearly defining the focus of your research. It helps in filtering out irrelevant studies that do not pertain specifically to your topic, making it easier to manage the subsequent data.

The other strategies suggested, such as sticking only to local sources, changing your thesis topic, or including all topics related to education as sub-topics, could either limit your research scope too much or lead to an overwhelming amount of information, neither of which would effectively address the issue of managing the data.