From Ho-Hum to Hands-On: Increasing Engagement in a Nursing One-Shot

Where I work there has been a nice series of library orientation sessions in place for nursing students as they progress through their college career.  What is great about this is the strong relationship that has developed between the library and the nursing professors, and the emphasis the nursing professors place on information literacy.  The nursing students are some of our heaviest library users on campus, and since we see them throughout their college career, we really get to know the students & their research needs (and we can usually spot when they’re in a stressed-out-just-need-chocolate-because-this-intense-paper-is-due-soon part of the semester).

Because the sequencing is so well established, it can be easy for us as librarians to just keep doing the same thing (which can get a bit stale—and if I'm bored, the students are definitely bored).  Such is the case with a traditional one-shot we’ve been teaching to reintroduce CINAHL basics, and add on a few more bells & whistles (limiters, subject headings, CINAHL headings, citation tool, ILLing, etc.).  In addition to CINAHL basics, we also show them where to search and find nursing policy information. In the past we’ve done a pretty traditional lecture-demo/work time session with the students. I’ve noticed students not being as engaged as I would like—and I put myself in their shoes and asked “how would I want to learn this?” The word that came to mind: active.  

With that in mind, my colleague and I decided to make a few changes. Nothing drastic, as we don’t want to throw the nursing faculty off too much; we just wanted the students to be more actively engaged with the resources and the database navigation process (rather than just following along as we say “click here, then click here”).

As I mentioned earlier, we were stuck in a “sage on the stage” rut & wanted to move to more of a “guide on the side” approach.  To do this we revamped the lesson to reintroduce the students to CINAHL, remind them of the types of materials within (and how that’s different from a basic web search), and then (instead of having us walk everyone through the features) we wrote prompts for seven groups to practice using the features found in their prompts.  Then each group will teach the rest of the class how to use those features, and we will wander from group to group (to support them and help with questions) as they work through the prompt to prepare to teach their classmates. This approach is nothing earth-shattering, but it will be good for the students to 1) work in groups to learn their assigned prompt skills, and 2) teach those skills to their colleagues, and 3) just get up and move and talk with their classmates after having risen at the break of dawn and been focusing on clinicals all day. This will help get their blood circulating instead of just hiding behind a computer screen. 

Here are a couple of examples of the prompts we plan to use:

Your group will be teaching the class how to do the following tasks: 

• Using the Electronic Journal List (under the Journals tab on the library website) locate the full-text for this article within CINAHL.

Lavoie-Tremblay, M., Richer, M., Marchionni, C., Cyr, G., Biron, A. D., Aubry, M., & ... Vézina, M. (2012). Implementation of evidence-based Practices in the context of a redevelopment project in a Canadian healthcare organization. Journal Of Nursing Scholarship, 44(4), 418-427. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1547-5069.2012.01480.x

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Your group will be teaching the class how to do the following tasks:  

• Using CINAHL, be able to login to MyEbscohost, create a folder, perform a search (using the limiters we discussed at the beginning of class: date, research article, English language, Nursing subset), select an article or articles and put them into that folder.

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Your group will be teaching the class how to do the following tasks:  

• Using the limiters we discussed at the beginning of class (date, research article, English language, Nursing subset) conduct a basic search using the following search terms health care delivery; show your classmates how to access a full-text article and show the steps involved in printing that article double sided. Then, show the citation button and where to find the APA citation, show an example of a citation with a DOI and explain when to use a permalink (when there is no DOI). Show your classmates where the permalink button is.

After the groups present/teach we’ll redirect the class to think about where/how to find nursing policy information on the web. We’ll start by reminding them of web evaluation criteria, then look at our list of recommended websites, and then go to nursing organization websites to find policy, advocacy, and resolution information.

We haven’t put the plan to action yet, but we’re hoping all goes smoothly!