Teaching skills in medical information retrieval to medical students

Most students are admitted to medical school with little or no prior training in medical information retrieval. Despite the increasing dependence of physicians on new information tools, such as computer data bases and on-line literature searching, few medical schools have included more than token emphasis on information retrieval skills in their curricula. Reports on information skills courses have revealed that the courses often encounter serious obstacles, including poor student acceptance. The authors here describe a project that attempts to overcome the principal obstacles and to provide an efficient and effective method of teaching information retrieval skills to second-year medical students. The method includes a pretest that contains case scenarios, a diagnosis of individual students' deficiencies in information skills, a self-paced individual learning module, and a posttest. Evaluation of the program showed that the students had deficiencies in information retrieval skills and that the students who used the self-instruction module had significantly higher scores on the posttest than the students who did not.