Use of an Audience Response System in an Evidence-Based Mini-Curriculum

Abstract

Since 2002, library faculty at the Indiana University School of Medicine have taught third-year medical students how to retrieve the best evidence from MEDLINE to address their clinical questions. In preparation for their Neurology, Medicine, and Psychiatry clerkships, students attended a review of evidence-based medicine principles and techniques for searching the literature. The session was team-taught by two faculty members, one from the Internal Medicine department and the other from the Library. The librarian reviewed important MEDLINE principles for constructing a good subject search and applying appropriate evidence-based filters. During the clerkships, students were asked to generate clinical questions arising from their patient encounters, searched MEDLINE for the best evidence, critiqued the results, and then applied them back to their patients' care. Library faculty provided individualized feedback on the student searches. A follow-up session two months later reinforced MEDLINE principles, used student searches as examples, and extended the discussion to other evidence-based, point-of-care resources. To add to the interactivity of the follow-up sessions, librarians used an audience response system to measure students' understanding of literature retrieval techniques and to gauge student preferences for information seeking on clinical topics. Overall, the sessions have been well-received by the students.

How are medical students trained to locate biomedical information to practice evidence-based medicine? a review of the 2007–2012 literature

“…Following the removal of duplicate articles, review of titles and abstracts of the 433 articles left 23 articles that appeared to meet the inclusion criteria. After full-text review, 12 articles remained for analysis [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] (Table 1).…”

Instructional methods used by health sciences librarians to teach evidence-based practice (EBP): a systematic review

“…The majority of studies used two or more teaching methods, with only seven studies relying solely on one method [16,17,23,24,29,32,38]. However, some studies were not clear if only one teaching method was employed because teaching methods were not consistently described.…”

“…The overwhelming majority of the studies utilized one or more individual-level skills assessments, primarily of search performance, with only one utilizing a brief, classroom-level assessment [23]. Pretests and posttests of search skills were frequently reported [14-18, 20, 22, 25-27, 31, 32, 37, 39].…”

“…Of the twenty-seven studies selected for inclusion, twenty-six were journal articles and one was an academic conference proceeding [14]. Sixteen articles, representing more than half of the publications in this set, were published in library and information science journals: seven in the Journal of the Medical Library Association [15][16][17][18][19][20][21], four in Medical Reference Services Quarterly [22][23][24][25], four in Health Information & Libraries Journal [26][27][28][29], and one in the Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association/Journal de l'Association des bibliothèques de la santé du Canada [30]. Ten articles were published in health sciences journals, including two in BMC Medical Education [31,32], three in the Journal of General Internal Medicine [33][34][35], and five in other health sciences journals [36][37][38][39][40].…”

“…Acquiring the best evidence (search strategy development, searching techniques, information sources, study selection, and acquiring of full text) was the most common step included, with all 27 studies addressing this skill during instruction. Asking an answerable question, clinical question development, and/or the PICO question format was second, with 22 of the 27 studies including this skill [15][16][17][18][19][20][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. Twelve studies [17,18,20,22,25,29,31,32,34,36,38,39] addressed critical appraisal of evidence for 1 or more of the following: level of evidence based on hierarchy of evidence; study design; statistics use and reporting; therapy, diagnosis, or other question type-specific indicators such as likelihood ratios, number needed to treat, or absolute risk reductions; or evaluation criteria for qualitative and quantitative study designs, or for websites.…”