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Teaching tip: using the "Who wants to be a millionaire?" game to teach searching skills
Information Scientist
Oxford, UK
Key Words: evidence-based medicine
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
At a search skills workshop, it’s often difficult to obtain information about participants’ skill levels in advance. So to pitch your session at the right level, you need to find out if your participants have done any searching before, and whether they understand concepts such as question formulation, Boolean logic, and MeSH. Have you tried contacting participants for information before a session? Invariably—if you actually obtain any responses—the participants will vary between stating that they know "nothing about searching" or that they are "pretty good searchers," neither of which turns out to be true when they arrive.
It can be easier to obtain this information at the beginning of your workshop. Ask participants to demonstrate their level of expertise in a non-threatening game or icebreaker exercise. It is also an opportunity to show that attending a searching workshop can be fun! One group exercise we use is a game based
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