PORT ANGELES — Two Peninsula College faculty members are wrapping up the first part of a program to improve Internet literacy on health topics in students.
Through a series of tests and exercises, students receive feedback on how well they are evaluating the legitimacy of websites with medical information.
The program at Peninsula College is run by Jen Gouge, program director for the Medical Assistants program, and David Kent, research and instruction librarian, and is funded by a $6,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health.
The program was designed at Central Michigan University by Lana V. Ivanitskaya and Anne Marie Casey.
“We were the only West Coast school selected,” Gouge said.
“What we are learning and seeing is how [the students] tend to access and evaluate information.”
Evaluate information
Students in health classes are given a 40-minute test to look up and evaluate different health information on the Internet.
After the test, the instructors and the student immediately receive a printout with feedback.
The idea is for students going into a medical field to learn how to search for medical information and how to discern bias in sites.
“For example, if you’re looking up information on Dr. Scholl’s inserts, looking at the Dr. Scholl’s website might not be the best place because they are trying to sell a product,” Gouge said.
Through the feedback and the exercises on the tests, students learn how to look up who owns and operates a website and how to determine what, if any, effect that has on the information, she added.
“It is very exciting,” she said.
“This concept will eventually be used in many other disciplines. It just starts with medicine.”
Once they graduate, students can help patients.
“Then, when someone says that they found something on the Internet, the student can then say whether that is a reliable website or not and further direct the patient to reliable resources online,” Gouge said.
But in addition to the students learning, the information goes back to Ivanitskaya, who is conducting research on two primary questions:
• Do future health professionals have the requisite skills to engage in evidence-based practice and lifelong professional education?
• Can they find credible health information for their patients?
The tests and program are meant to teach, building on previous research by Ivanitskaya.
In her previous research, she found that two-thirds of people taking the test did not know how to apply Boolean operators in search engines.
Boolean operators
Boolean operators are ways to narrow the search down with limiting words that the search engine recognizes — such as “and,” “or” and “not” — according to the National Institutes of Health summary of her previous study.
Also, although about 89 percent of students understood that a one-word keyword search was likely to prompt too many results, they could not narrow down the search by using multiple categories in an advanced search, the summary said.
The study also revealed that about half had trouble differentiating between a primary and secondary source.
The program aims to improve Internet searching skills throughout many schools in the nation, Gouge said.
“Even just in the taking of the tests, we are learning, the students are learning,” she said.
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.