When the Medical Library Association identified questions critical for the future of the profession, it assigned groups to use systematic reviews to find the answers to these questions. Group 6, whose question was on emerging technologies, recognized early on that the systematic review process would not work well for this question, which looks forward to predict future trends, whereas the systematic review process looks back in time. We searched for new methodologies that were more appropriate to our question, developing a process that combined systematic review, text mining, and visualization techniques. We then discovered tech mining, which is very similar to the process we had created. In this paper, we describe our research design and compare tech mining and systematic review methodologies. There are similarities and differences in each process: Both use a defined research question, deliberate database selection, careful and iterative search strategy development, broad data collection, and thoughtful data analysis. However, the focus of the research differs significantly, with systematic reviews looking to the past and tech mining mainly to the future. Our comparison demonstrates that each process can be enhanced from a purposeful consideration of the procedures of the other. Tech mining would benefit from the inclusion of a librarian on their research team and a greater attention to standards and collaboration in the research project. Systematic reviews would gain from the use of tech mining tools to enrich their data analysis and corporate management communication techniques to promote the adoption of their findings.
OBJECTIVEStudents often utilize practice questions to improve understanding and retention of session content and to prepare for exams. However, a major challenge is aligning questions with session learning objectives. The goal of this study is to change student behavior to use questions as a learning tool, create intuitive question searching at the correct level, and align commercial and professor‐written question banks.METHODA developmental model was created combining faculty‐generated questions with commercial question bank questions. Three surveys were sent out to assess perceptions of question bank utilization. The first two surveys were sent out simultaneously, one to faculty and one to students, to assess how practice questions were used for study purposes. Following the developmental model, a pilot study was created using two practice quizzes with faculty‐generated practice questions for a pharmacy anatomy course. After the completion of the pharmacy anatomy course, the third survey was sent out to pharmacy students to assess their perception of the utility of practice quizzes and to assess whether student utilization of quizzes had changed.RESULTSTwenty‐three percent of faculty responded to the survey, indicating that most faculty create their own questions, but do not direct students to use commercial question banks. Seventy‐two students (a 12.04% response rate) responded to the first survey, indicating that 53% of students use faculty provided questions while 40% use commercial question banks and 34% use both. Most students reported using question banks to study the week before a test, three days before, or the day before the test. The first survey indicates that roughly 15% and 5.6% of students quiz themselves the same week of the lecture and the day of the lecture, respectively. In comparison, the post‐survey after the pilot study with a 15% response rate demonstrates that students began studying earlier using quiz questions. The post‐survey indicates 28.6% and 7.1% of students in the pilot study test themselves the week of the lecture and the day of the lecture, respectively. The percentage of students who quizzed themselves a week before the test also jumped from 44.4% to 57.1%. Additionally, in the original survey, only 37.5% of students said that they always incorporate practice questions as part of their studying. In the follow up survey, this jumped to 50%.CONCLUSIONThe initial survey showed students inhibit their study strategies by not quizzing themselves early enough. However, the curated set of progressive questions helped students incorporate question banks into their studying. Additionally, they used the question banks to start studying more effectively by quizzing themselves earlier.Support or Funding InformationPhiladelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine GeorgiaThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.
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