Susan McGinty PT, EdD,
Chair, CSUS Department of Physical Therapy
(916) 278-6426
Robyn Nelson RN DNS, Chair,
CSUS Division of Nursing
6000 J St., El Dorado Hall
(916) 278-6525
Funds Requested: $4165
Submission Date: April 23,
2004
The
nation’s need for information competent health care professionals has never
been higher. New information is
generated at a rate of more than 5 exabytes/year[1]. If printed, it would require half a million
new libraries the size of the Library of Congress Print Collections. To compound the challenge of shear volume of
information, the time available for therapists and nurses to access that data
has decreased. Improved care strategies
and budgetary considerations have shortened hospital stay and the time a
provider has to spend with each client.
Ethical and litigious considerations mandate use of evidence-based
practice and require that practitioners be efficient and discriminatory in
their ability to access information and make decisions about applying that
information to the care of patients.
Faculty
educating healthcare professionals need to ensure that these information
competence (IC) skills are learned. From
the standpoint of quality and patient care safety, it is far more important to
learn how to find the information needed tomorrow than to memorize the
information needed today.
Goals of
this project are to create intradepartmental experts in designing assignments
to teach and evaluate students’ competency to manage web-based
information. The proposal is a joint
project between the Physical Therapy and Nursing Departments at CSUS. Faculty from each department will be targeted
for in-depth training provided by campus mentors. These faculty will design web-search
assignments for a large course that is a prerequisite for both majors, and for
additional undergraduate or graduate courses within the respective majors. Additionally, the new faculty experts will
provide training and curricular guidance for others in their departments.
·
Training session with librarian and faculty
mentor. In this session, IC skills
required by therapists and nurses will be identified. Web-based IC activities used by other departments
will be reviewed.
·
Development of two web-search papers for N14, General
Pharmacology. These will be done within
the WebCT framework and will require that students access various websites with
pharmaceutical and nutriceutical information.
Guidelines will be provided to increase student efficiency such as the
use of the “find on this page” feature for searching a large document for a
specific piece of information. Ability
to access research abstracts will be demonstrated. Activities will direct the student in
locating and evaluating newsworthy topics such as the Medicare changes,
purchasing drugs from
·
An additional advanced web-search activity will be
developed for two nursing courses and for a physical therapy course by the
respective faculty. This project will
build on knowledge and skills gained in N14.
·
Presentations of the project will occur in
departmental meetings, and at the
·
Faculty from each
department will review program learning outcomes and revise as necessary to
include statements of IC consistent with those published in the Information
Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.[2]
August
2004: Training sessions
September-November
2004: Development of activities for N14.
January
2005: Development/implementation of advanced activities.
March-April
2005: Dissemination.
N14, General Pharmacology,
is offered via distance education each semester and has an annual enrollment of
approximately 325 students. As a
prerequisite for both professional programs, the composition of students is
primarily pre-nursing and pre-physical therapy.
About 20% of those enrolled are anticipating careers in other fields
such as education, business, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, social work, and
medicine. The future ability of students
to access reliable drug information is important even for those not entering a
health profession. Few people will make
it through life without needing information on drugs and herbs, whether
selecting an over-the-counter pain medicine for themselves or counseling a
grandparent on interactions between their multiple drugs.
The nursing program at CSUS
graduates approximately 140 BSN and 15 MSN students each year. The Physical Therapy Department has 32
graduate students each year. Courses
targeted for the advanced web search paper are required for all students in the
major.
Budget
One WTU of release time for
physical therapy ($1666) and 1.5 WTU of release time for Nursing ($2499). Mentors will not receive funding. Assistance in developing web pages to report
on outcomes of the project ($15 x 10 hours).
Total requested………………………$4315
Qualifications
Project mentors are
librarian Linda Goff, and faculty member Carolyn VanCouwenberghe. Grant recipients are faculty members Ed
Barakatt, Kristine Warner and Brenda Hanson-Smith.
Linda J. Goff is the Head of
Instructional Services at the CSUS Library.
Linda has both a Masters in Instructional Technology and a Masters in
Library Science. She is the largest user
of WebCT at CSUS. Linda designed and
maintains the Information Competency WebCT assignment, a required unit
integrated into Communication Studies 2, 4 and 5 courses. This IC program currently is used with over
100 course sections serving approximately 3,000 students annually.
Carolyn VanCouwenberghe RN
PhD is a Professor of Nursing with extensive experience in developing Web-based
learning activities. Her teaching
assignments are primarily in pre-nursing and first semester nursing
courses. She is Faculty of Record for
N14, and has developed web search papers to teach and evaluate students’ use of
pharmacological web sites.
Ed Barakatt, PT, MA, ABD is
an Associate Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy and teaches the
Research Methods in Physical Therapy I & II courses in the graduate
program. Professor Barakatt is the department’s
liaison with the national web-based project of the American Physical Therapy
Association’s Section on Research called “Hooked-on-Evidence.” A goal for this
course is to instruct students in how to access, utilize, and contribute to
this web-based resource for clinicians.
Kristine Warner RN, MPH,
PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Nursing who teaches in the senior year
community health course. Skilled in the
use of Blackboard and websites for class assignments from her previous position
at CSU Fresno, she has taken a WebCT course at CSUS and is anxious to implement
strategic web-based IC activities in her teaching at CSUS.
Brenda Hanson-Smith RNC, MSN,
DNS, is a Professor of Nursing who teaches in the mid-program maternal-child
nursing course. Additionally she chairs
the Undergraduate Program Committee for the Division of Nursing. Although a senior faculty member, she and her
course colleagues are relatively new to online teaching and testing. She is targeting a Women’s Health course
assignment as part of her contribution to ensuring the graduation of
information competent nurses.
"Today's
education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how
students live and how they learn...Students will spend their adult lives in a
multitasking, multifaceted, technology-driven, diverse, vibrant world-and they
must arrive equipped to do so."[3]
[1]
Executive Summary: How much information? 2003. UC Berkeley’s
[2] http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/standards.pdf
[3]
Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Learning for the 21st Century.