Tuesday, May 22, 2007

MLA 2007 Monday, May 21

Curriculum Integration - University of Nevada School of Medicine
presentation from Terry Henner on their program to integrate library resources into the medical school's curriculum. Their med school's program is similar to ours with a problem-based learning structure where student meet in small groups on Monday and Friday. In the Monday session they are introduced to a new case and they have to determine what their learning objectives are and then report and discuss their findings in their Friday afternoon session.

The Library reviews all cases for "teachable" moments and then establishes links to library resources and the librarians act as a resource to the faculty facilitators for each group.

The Library's objectives for this program is to:
a. introduce the students to a broad array of digital resources
b. guide students in their selection of resources
c. teach resource specific search mechanisms
d. without impeding the group process

There were pros: students found answers, they felt more confident in finding information, and the process led to them requesting more lectures to go into more depth on some of the information they pulled up in their searches. The cons were that some students felt that going online in the small groups impeded their discussion time, students got confused with what resources to chose since there are many and several of them focused on the same kinds of materials, and three, it can't be demonstrated that by the end of their fourth year the students had retained much of the information on searching and library resources they received in their first and second years.

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