As the volume of data in our society grows, the need to know how to locate important information quickly increases. Students need to understand concepts related to handling information to solve problems and do research electronically. To accomplish this, they must locate the right kind of information and organize it in ways to draw relationships between isolated elements. One way to achieve finding pertinent facts is to have students use a database. A database is an electronic method of creating, organizing, manipulating, storing, and retrieving information. The primary function of a database is to store facts in a way that makes it easy to locate later.

A database offer students and teachers several kinds of capabilities they could not use with information stored on paper, in file folders, in filing cabinets, or in books. You can use this application to prepare classroom materials, organize student information, inventory instructional resources, teach research and study skills, or pose and test hypotheses. Teachers have long recognized the unique capabilities of database software to support instruction in problem solving, research skills, and information management as well as higher level concepts such as classification and keyword searching. In many cases, a database can generate an information “picture” that may not be visible in other ways for students to analyze.

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