EBM notebook
Teaching tip: using the "Who wants to be a millionaire?" game to teach searching skills
Information Scientist
Oxford, UK
Key Words: evidence-based medicine
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
At a search skills workshop, its often difficult to obtain information about participants skill levels in advance. So to pitch your session at the right level, it is necessary to find out if your participants have done any searching before, and whether they understand concepts such as question formulation, Boolean logic, and MeSH. Have you tried contacting participants for information before a session? Invariablyif you actually obtain any responsesthe participants will vary between stating that they know "nothing about searching" or that they are "pretty good searchers," neither of which turns out to be true when they arrive.
It can be easier to obtain this information at the beginning of your workshop. Ask participants to demonstrate their level of expertise within a non-threatening game or icebreaker exercise. It is also an opportunity to show that attending a searching workshop can be fun! One group exercise we use is a game
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
