In September 2007 the Medical School Library team introduced the Turning point audience response system – Clickers – into the Library induction sessions for the 1st year Medical School Graduate Entry Programme students, 72 students coming to the Library induction in three groups.

The software was used to produce a quiz to be used at the beginning of each of the three 2 hour long sessions. The quiz was designed to help the Librarians and students gauge their level of understanding of issues related to finding quality health information using the resources available.

[The quiz questions are attached as a ppt presentation.]

 

 

The experience of using the clickers was a positive one. The students responded well and seemed to enjoy using the technology.

For the librarians the responses gained helped us to shape further sessions for the students. For example in one session for the question:

 

“When searching for health information on the internet where would you look first?”

The responses were as follows;

Search engine               60.97%

Wikipedia                     17.39%

Subject gateway           13.04%

News page                   8.70%

 

This helped the librarians shape a further session looking at web resources, concentrating on promoting the use of subject gateways and portals when searching for health information.

 

For the second question in the quiz students were asked to agree or disagree with the following statement;

 

“I am confident in my ability to locate health information using a range of resources”

 

In one session the answers were as follows;

Strongly agree              16%

Agree                           17.39%

Disagree                       32%

Strongly disagree          8%

 

To finish the quiz each group was asked to answer the question again;

 

In this same session the responses were now;

Strongly agree              19.05%

Agree                           57.14%

Disagree                       19.05%

Strongly disagree          4.76%

 

These results show that the experience of the quiz and answering questions about their ability to find good quality information had increased the confidence of the students in this area.

 

In conclusion we found that making use of the Clickers in our induction sessions had the following benefits;