| As medical schools increasingly emphasize self-directed knowledge acquisition and the development of lifelong learning skills, medical education increasingly includes an information literacy component. By learning how to effectively search medical information resources, students build knowledge and find answers that support their learning objectives while also developing skills that will help them keep current throughout their professional careers.; Academic medical libraries are supporting medical student curricula by offering MEDLINE literature database searching training. The training serves to introduce students to the importance of the database as well as impart skills to help students find relevant literature. Researchers are measuring the impact the training has on students' searching skill acquisition. However, the research is this area is in its infancy and little is known about the long-term impact of MEDLINE instruction.; This study examined the use of a locally-developed MEDLINE searching skills assessment tool and found support for the tool's reliability and validity for measuring Ovid MEDLINE searches. Inter-rater reliability was high, and the simple differences of the inter-rater scores were low. Although the clinical scenarios used in the research were created to measure the same process, further research is needed to determine the actual relative difficulty of the ten questions. The content of the tool was similar to other tools, supporting professional consensus on important elements. Also, the grading tool was able to differentiate between poor, adequate, good, and expert searchers when comparing searching skill scores with measures of recall and precision.; Students maintained their Ovid MEDLINE searching skills from year one to year four of the medical school curriculum. However, their ability to conduct a good search that also achieved adequate levels of recall and precision dropped significantly over the same time period. Some relationships between use, skill, and perceived importance were identified including self-reported skill and importance, importance and usage, usage and self-reported skill, self-reported skill and measured search ability, and measured search ability and F-measure (a harmonized mean of recall and precision). Overall, the students performed well on the search assignments, but several recommendations for future MEDLINE searching information literacy instruction are provided. |
