ERIC (sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education)

• indexes journal articles, books, research syntheses, conference papers, and reports
• contains over 1.2 million records
• includes a detailed THESAURUS for descriptor terms

CBCA: The Arts (Canadian perspective; not exclusively scholarly)

• indexes Canadian education journals, magazines, newsletters and newspapers in the Education subset.

Education Source

• indexes journals, books, and yearbooks.
• covers all levels of education — from early childhood to higher education — as well as all educational specialties such as multilingual education, health education and testing.

A thesaurus is a great tool for finding and refining search terms in a subject-specific database. ERIC has an education term thesaurus, for example, as does the PsycINFO psychology database and the MEDLINE medicine database.

Thesauri are curated by database editors; thesaurus term search looks at the subject and/or descriptor field in each database record.

Watch the video below (2:52 mins) to get familiar with the ProQuest thesaurus system, the one used by the ERIC education database:

ProQuest

• can search 64 databases in parallel (including ERIC, CBCA Education, PsycINFO and many major science and social science databases), or conduct custom parallel searches
• "one-stop-shopping"
• cannot use a thesaurus effectively in parallel searches.

Scopus

• major multidisciplinary database for the social sciences, life sciences, health sciences, physical sciences, and arts and humanities
• covers research literature published in academic journals, Open Access journals, conference proceedings, trade publications, and book series
• includes 200 million quality Web sources
• no thesaurus

While there is journal title coverage overlap between Scopus and Web of Science, as shown below, the two databases differ in depth of coverage (Web of Science indexes articles and keeps tracks of citations going back to the 1960s whereas Scopus coverage starts in the 1990s).

Web of Science

• major interdisciplinary database featuring more than 8,000 journals in 150 disciplines
• extensive citation searching
• no thesaurus

You can find lists of discipline-specific databases via the Subjects A-Z link. Many discipline-specific databases have thesauri and search facet tools optimized for disciplinary research. Here is part of the database list for Biology: