Nancy E. Adams

Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Learning Objectives

Information professionals who train or instruct others can use Blooms taxonomy to write learning objectives that describe the skills and abilities that they desire their learners to master and demonstrate. Blooms taxonomy differentiates between cognitive skill levels and calls attention to learning objectives that require higher levels of cognitive skills and, therefore, lead to deeper learning and transfer of knowledge and skills to a greater variety of tasks and contexts.

A guiding framework to maximise the power of the arts in medical education: a systematic review and metasynthesis.

A rich literature describes many innovative uses of the arts in professional education. However, arts‐based teaching tends to be idiosyncratic, depending on the interests and enthusiasm of individual teachers, rather than on strategic design decisions. An overarching framework is needed to guide implementation of arts‐based teaching in medical education. The objective of this study was to review and synthesise the literature on arts‐based education and provide a conceptual model to guide design, evaluation and research of the use of the arts in medical education.

Users Learning from Users: Building a Learning Commons from the Ground Up at a New University

The learning commons of Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is a physical space and cultural concept resulting from collaboration between the library and information technology services. Four tenets guided the development of the learning commons: (1) users learn from users; (2) serve the needs of the “Google” learner; (3) craft a tailored resource mix emphasizing electronic resources; and (4) resist organizational insularity.

Individualized Patient-Centered Care: A Physician Assistant Curriculum in Information Mastery, Clinical Reasoning, and Shared Decision Making

This article describes a novel preclinical physician assistant (PA) curriculum that teaches skills in point-of-care information mastery, patient-centered communication, clinical reasoning, and the process of shared decision making—all leading to a truly individualized patient-centered care model. In the 1990s, Sackett described evidence-based medicine (EBM) as the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of the best current evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. In 2002, Guyatt et al stated the principle that evidence is never enough: patient values and preferences must also be considered. Using EBM to develop an appropriate plan of care for an individual patient, therefore, means integrating clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence andwith thepatient’s values inmind. Shared decisionmaking is the process bywhich thebest evidence and individual patient preferences are considered and acted upon by the health care provider and the patient as partners. EBM and shared decision making are both essential for patientcentered care. Practicing these principles is crucial because an estimated average of 3.2 clinical questions arise for every 10 patient encounters in primary care, yet only one-third of these questions are answeredor pursued.AlthoughMEDLINEpublishes over 2000 articles daily, health professionals spend an averageof just 2minutes to search for information. Toaddress this problem, Slawson and Shaughnessy incorporate the best evidence into the busyworld of clinical practice by focusing on finding, evaluating, and using information at the point of care. They use the term “information mastery” for this process and note that it requires sources that have critically appraised and graded thequality of the evidence. Extensive application of sophisticated statistical skills and the time to perform them can now be delegated to evaluation services such as the United States Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) or a validated database such as DynaMed. By contrast, traditional EBMeducation inmedical school and PA curricula often focuses on statistical analysis and critical appraisal of articles. Information mastery, point-of-care use, and shared decision making are not typically part of this traditional curriculum and are inadequately described in the PA literature. Goldgar and Keahey describe their experience of connecting the curriculum to patient care using the EBMwrite-up method that requires learners to apply concepts of EBM to a clinical question arising from a patient encounter. These same authors describe the best clinical information tools according to the individual student’s stage of training. Werner and Richter highlight educational instruction of reliability concepts in EBM appraisal and how this type of training prepares PAs to communicate scientific results with other clinicians. Physician assistant training continues to be anchored by the fundamental concepts of anatomy and pathophysiology, physical diagnosis, and principles of pharmacology. Our curriculum teaches the foundational concepts of EBM and information mastery in one course and patient-centered communication skills, clinical reasoning, and shared decision making in a second and parallel course, comprising the pillars of our model for teaching individualized patientcentered care (Figure 1). The focus of this article is the design and outcome of that model. The curriculum allows PA students, while they study EBM and information management, to learn and practice entering into a dialoguewith thepatient, guiding thepatient to choices and leading the patient to take ownership of disease management through incorporating individual patient preferences. Consequently, our goal is to provide PA students with the skillset needed to engage patients in shared decision Feature Editor’s Note:

Asking a Great Question: A Librarian Teaches Questioning Skills to First-Year Medical Students

In a single one-hour session, first-year medical students were taught a framework for differentiating between lower-order questions that lead to knowledge of facts and higher-order questions that lead to integration of concepts and deeper learning, thereby preparing them for problem-based learning (PBL). Students generated lists of questions in response to an assertion prompt and categorized them according to Blooms Taxonomy. These data were analyzed in addition to data from the course exam, which asked them to formulate a higher-level question in response to a prompt. Categorizing questions according to Blooms Taxonomy was a more difficult task for students than was formulating higher-order questions. Students reported that the skills that they learned were used in subsequent PBL sessions to formulate higher-order learning objectives that integrated new and previously-learned concepts.

Collaborating to increase access to clinical and educational resources for surgery: a case study.

A case study is described in which collaborations between a Department of Surgery, a Department of Information Technology, and an academic health sciences library resulted in the development of an electronic surgical library available at the bedside, the deployment of tablet devices for surgery residents, and implementation of a tablet-friendly user interface for the institutions electronic medical record.