Initial Workshop Assessment Thoughts

My pre-workshop (for the "Introduction to Searching one-shot) survey takes the form of 2 questions:

1. Provide a topic of your choosing or choose one of the examples I provide
2. Given the topic, type in what you might put in a search box to find articles on the topic

Overwhelmingly, in the 53 responses I've gotten to date in it's current iteration, students show a distinct "Googlization" in their search strategies. Full-sentence questions and long lists of keywords make up ALL of the responses to question two. A couple of responses use and or double quotes, but all are used incompletely or incorrectly.

My post-workshop results (that include the same question) show vast improvements on this (and I go to great lengths to show why common Google search strategies don't work in most library databases), but still highlight some gaps, especially in correctly using, or not using, double quotes.

It's a start...