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Poster Abstract
Making the Grade: An Evaluation of Information Seeking Skills For Medical College of Georgia Second Year Medical Students
Kathy Davies, Education Services Coordinator; and Lyn Dennison, Assistant Director for Library Operations, Greenblatt Library Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, GA.
Purpose: The School of Medicine faculty and Library faculty collaborated to improve students’ ability to search and appraise MEDLINE and Internet resources.
Setting: The Medical College of Georgia is Georgia’s public academic health sciences center consisting of five Schools. The School of Medicine has 180 students per class. Students take an Essentials of Medicine course for their first 2 years, a multi-component course with a variety of teaching and evaluation tools. The library is a component of this course and students receive a part of their grade from the Library faculty.
Brief Description: Library faculty used several methods to teach searching and evaluating information resources. Methods included hands-on instructional sessions, lecture, and online examples. Customized practice sessions were presented to small groups and individuals upon request. The students were evaluated informally by practice exercises during Fall library sessions. The students were given clinical questions and required to submit Internet and MEDLINE searches for grading in the Spring semester.
Results: Grading of student searches increased their interest in learning information seeking skills. Many students sought out customized small group sessions or individual consultations. In general, students successfully performed an Internet search, but did not perform as well in distinguishing quality sites. For MEDLINE, student searches revealed a good understanding of using MeSH and appropriate limits. Students had more difficulty with combining sets, applying evidence-based filters, using Boolean operators and selecting a quality article or study.
Evaluation Methods: Search scores were included in final grades for the Essentials of Clinical Medicine Course. The searches were graded using grids to define criteria for effective search strategies and selecting appropriate resources.
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Last modified: Tuesday, 15 October 2002
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