Blog Homework: Searching as Strategic Exploration

searching for information requires evaluation of a broad range of information sources and an open-mind that will be flexible enough to pursue different platforms/avenues of information.




Theme: Youth, Alcohol, Drugs and other substance abuse
Audience: 1st Year Psychology students
Number of attendees: 15 students and 1 Librarians
Venue: UWC Training room
Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Materials:
  • Computers with internet
  • Access to databases
  • Pen, paper, kokis, and flip chart board for presentations
  • Printed articles

Objectives: It’s no secret that South Africa has a problem with substance abuse amongst youth and this imposes social, health and economic costs on individuals, families, society and economy at large. According to researchers, substance abuse has been linked to depression, violent behaviour and various forms of crime, including many accidental and fatal injuries and killings.

Knowledge practice: This little exercise will assist in making things easy for these students as they will be dealing with such patients in future. They will know how and where to search and locate information. Students will work in 3 pairs, which will be 5 groups. There will be short presentations for each activity.


Learning outcomes
Activities

Students will be able to recognize the sources that covers information on their disciplines and what role each format of information plays in the discipline (i.e newspapers covers stories as they break-out, non-scholarly magazines covers full stories based on the interviews with the victims, etc.)
Give students different information sources on the subject and they must identify the types of sources (e.g. newspaper article, non-scholarly magazine article, scholarly magazine article, book chapter, conference paper, information from the website, etc.).

Students will be able to identify their information needs, discover search terms in order to find information about their topic, and to identify keywords from a given topic and use appropriate search commands that will meet those identified information needs.

Give students a topic “underage drinking”. They will have to brainstorm keywords and search terms that they are going to use to search for information. They will be expected to at least come up with these terms:
  • Teenage drinking  
  • Youth and drugs  
  • Alcohol and teens
  • Causes of underage drinking .
  • Health effects of teen drinking Effects of .
  • underage drinking

Students will be able to search sources on databases or OPAC effectively, efficiently and with confidence
Students will search for 2 books and 2 articles on smart search using the identified keywords/search terms





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