Instructing occupational therapy students in information retrieval

The effectiveness of a brief program designed to teach occupational therapy students enrolled in a graduate research methods class to conduct searches of four electronic databases was investigated. Students in the experimental class read an instructional booklet and received approximately 1 hour of supervised practice time using compact disk--read-only memory (CD-ROM) equipment. Questionnaire data revealed that compared with the students in the control class, the students completing the training program reported being significantly more familiar with six of seven key concepts and indicated significantly higher levels of usage of the four databases studied in the program.