Information Retrieved from a Database and the Augmentation of Personal Knowledge

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Abstract
Objective: To assess the degree to which information retrieved from a biomedical database can augment personal knowledge in addressing novel problems, and how the ability to retrieve information evolves over time. Design: This longitudinal study comprised three assessments of two cohorts of medical students. The first assessment occurred just before student course experience in bacteriology, the second occurred just after the course, and the third occurred five months later. At each assessment, the students were initially given a set of bacteriology problems to solve using their personal knowledge only. Each student was then reassigned a sample of problems he or she had answered incorrectly, to work again with assistance from a database containing information about bacteria and bacteriologic concepts. The initial pass through the problems generated a “personal knowledge” score; the second pass generated a “database-assisted” score for each student at each assessment. Results: Over two cohorts, students' personal knowledge scores were very low (∼ 12%) at the first assessment. They rose substantially at the second assessment (∼ 48%) but decreased six months later (∼ 25%). By contrast, database-assisted scores rose linearly: from ∼ 44% at the first assessment to ∼ 57% at the second assessment, to ∼ 75% at the third assessment. Conclusion: The persistent increase in database-assisted scores, even when personal knowledge had attenuated, was the most remarkable finding of this study. While some of the increase maybe attributed to artifacts of the design, the pattern seems to result from the retained ability to recognize problem-relevant information in a database even when it cannot be recalled.