Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Teaching Evidenced-Based Search Skills
The University of Texas Health Science Center-San Antonio's Briscoe Library is teaching Evidenced-Based Search skills to 2nd year Med Students. This is a fantastic user-centered service. There is a definite need for the service as the students must learn to research evidence-based medicine articles to be successful. The librarians were clearly right on the money with the needs of the students. They were only expecting 25 students and instead had 162 on day 1 and 151 on day 2 out of a class of only 250. Some students actually came twice! The students actually asked for the training to become mandatory. This is a fantastic example of librarians meeting the needs of their patrons.
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Thats so good that it exceeded their expectations and I like the fact that the lesson is focused in on an exact subject that really helps the students, as said above!
ReplyDeleteYes this is a great offering and service. I’m fortunate as I work on campus at a teaching hospital that's affiliated with the UT Southwestern Medical School. UTSW Med School Library services are available to our staff.
ReplyDeleteOn March 2nd I attended a UTSW Med School Library class titled “Identifying EBM Medicine Resources”.
The class explored the three major EBM databases on the Library web site:
ACP PIER: Presents evidence-based clinical information on diagnosis and treatment. Produced by the American College of Physicians (ACP), and presented on the STAT!Ref platform.
DynaMed: Gives evidence-based, clinically-oriented summaries of more than 3,000 topics, including 800+ pharmaceutical summaries based on AHFS Drug Information.
UpToDate: Provides specific practical recommendations for diagnosis and treatment. Access allowed only from on campus.
I agree training is definitely needed for students. I read another article recently (sorry I don't remember the citation at the moment) and researches studied students using Dialog after a training session. The students had a high success rate after training, but kind of depressingly their skill never increased. Independent use of databases does not make for better searching, but attending training does.
ReplyDeleteHow wonderful that they are indeed meeting the needs of students! I wonder however at how much they miscalculated their expectations (25 expected vs the 161 that showed up). This is of course a wonderful surprise but it makes it sound as if the offering was a shot in the dark i.e. I wonder if students would like this service- rather than a carefully planned event. However, I hope the turn out give librarians the opportunity to ask questions, talk with the patrons, and discover other services and resources that may also be of such high demand and interest.
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