How Does Pretesting for PubMed Knowledge Spark Student Learning?

Abstract

Predoctoral students enter dental school with varying skill levels for searching biomedical databases and a tendency to overestimate their abilities. Accordingly, PubMed instruction is embedded within a required dental course and includes a graded component. This article describes a pretest/intervention/posttest developed for the PubMed session. The expectation for this new assessment was that motivation to learn PubMed would increase during the intervention if pretesting objectively showed students the difference between their self-perceived versus actual PubMed abilities. The goals were to help students better self-assess their genuine searching abilities, spark learning during the instruction session, and elicit measurable improvement in skills.

Keywords:

• Dental education
• dental students
• liaison librarians
• library instruction
• posttesting
• pretesting
• PubMed

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank HSLS colleagues for critique of test questions and content: Dane Alabran, MS (University of Pittsburgh Department of Statistics) for statistics consulting; and Clifton Franklund, PhD (Ferris State University) for the shareware spreadsheet used to analyze the pre/posttest results.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca A. Abromitis

Rebecca A. Abromitis, MLS ([email protected]) is Research & Instruction Librarian, and Liaison to the School of Dental Medicine, University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Library System, 200 Scaife Hall, 3550 Terrace Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15261.