By Beth Whipple MLS (NLM Fellow) and Elaine Skopelja MALS
Indiana University School of Medicine Library
Indianapolis, IN

Hoosier Science Teachers Surveyed about NLM Resources

The Hoosier Association of Science Teachers annual meeting (also known as HASTI) is the largest gathering of K-12 science teachers in Indiana. The HASTI team created a short informal survey to question teachers about their knowledge of MedlinePlus, their work with school media specialists, their knowledge of health resources on the web, and other questions that we wanted to investigate. With our GMR Exhibit Award, we received an NLM display stand and many materials to hand out.

During the meeting we spoke to over 250 teachers and handed out hundreds of promotional items. Before the meeting, we had requested the NLM exhibit Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/visibleproofs/) posters and handouts as an enticement to visit our booth, and this was very successful. We gave Visible Proofs posters away to those who filled out our survey, and later offered the remaining posters to any library in Indiana. They were eagerly snapped up by school and public libraries. Besides the MedlinePlus materials, Tox Town, ToxMystery, and the Genetic Home Reference materials were very popular overall.

Elementary and middle school teachers were very interested in any interactive games, lesson plans, and classroom activities. In addition to ToxMystery, they were shown the Children’s Page in MedlinePlus http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/childrenspage.html, which includes links to these types of materials.

Middle and high school biology teachers were interested in web resources that fit their teaching requirements, which included General Health, Nutrition, Genetics, and Environmental Health (which includes toxicology). Topics like anatomy, smoking, substance abuse, and disease information were also mentioned. High school classes in anatomy and health professional careers are becoming increasingly common, especially in the larger high schools.

Loud and clear, almost every teacher we spoke to said repeatedly that they had a great deal of trouble accessing sites on health topics. Since the vast majority indicated a major problem with school Internet filtering, there is a need to provide guidelines and assistance for helping school media specialists and teachers address the problem of filtering medical and health related topics. One way that schools have addressed the filtering problem in Indiana is to add the MedlinePlus link to the library’s list of resources, i.e. their homepage or library database page and specifically tell their IT people that the site and its links were safe. There may be other “best practices” that could assist teachers to resolve this problem.

For the full survey findings or for a copy of the survey used, please contact Elaine Skopelja (eskopelj@iupui.edu) or Beth Whipple (ewhipple@iupui.edu).

Funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health under Contract # NO1-LM-6-3503.

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