Locating and Disseminating Evidence-Based Practice

Finding a Research Study

1. Locate an article in an online professional journal published within the last 5 years that describes ONE research study that you believe would facilitate evidence-based practice atyour place of work or where you completed your clinical practicum. You DO NOT want to choose an article that reviews many studies on a particular topic. Also please exclude research reports dealing with instrument or tool development. Make sure you locate a research article appropriate for facilitating evidence based practice – the research question, type of research and ethical considerations should be clearly identifiable. You may use the AU library to locate an online article. You can access the library from your Moodle home page. Alternatively you can go directly to the library home page at http://library.athabascau.ca/journals/index.html. It may be easiest if you are new to searching articles online to use the "List of Journal Databases by Title" option. CINAHL database is a popular choice. Search terms such as "research" and "nursing" (or another discipline you are interested in) will help you to narrow your search to an article written by researchers from within your specific discipline. Also choose 1 or 2 search words that describe the topic you are interested in such as "oncology" or "dental health." Don't use "evidence-based" as a search term. When you combine the searches you will narrow the choices so that you willbe able to find an article appropriate for this assignment.

NOTE: Once you have located an article of interest to you, please email it to your tutor for feedback. Make sure you include the persistent link URL for your article (or your article

as a .pdf attachment). Submit using the links in the Assessment section on the course home page. You are responsible for making sure your tutor has a readable copy of your article. Please do not send URLs from libraries other than AU as your tutor will not be able to retrieve these.Depending on your discipline (as you are a mixed group including nurses, dieticians, physiotherapists, etc.) choose as well, an appropriate search term to narrow the field to discipline-specific research (eg, "nursing", "physiotherapy" etc.) to find an article written by researchers from within your discipline - as a way to promote evidence-based practice within your discipline. Obviously in the Health Sciences we are informed by research from other disciplines - but we want to encourage you to get acquainted to your disciplinary research and the breadth of discipline-specific as well as multidisciplinary journals.

2. Prepare a brief (no more than 12 slides) PowerPoint presentation to disseminate the findings of this study to your fellow students or colleagues in your practice area or to another group who would be interested in this research such as clients or patients. This is your target audience. The content of your presentation must include - a title page indicating the title of the presentation, who the presenter is (you) and your credentials. If the title of your presentation is the title of the article then a footer may be used on this slide to reference the authors and year. Next, identify your target audience, the title and reference for the article, why you selected this research article, the research problem/question and/or purpose, whether the study uses a qualitative or quantitative approach, how the researcher(s) to address ethical considerations, major findings of the study, and the value of the article to evidence-based practice. Your assignment will also Your assignment will also be graded for APA including a reference list, conciseness, creativity, design (slides not over crowded with text), consistency in terms of font size, style, titles etc., and grammar and spelling.

3. Submit using the links in the Assessment section on the course home page. Make sure you also include the persistent link URL or a .pdf copy of your article. Your assignment will not be graded until the tutor has your article.

4. After you receive feedback from your tutor on your presentation, revise your work as recommended. You do not need to resubmit your Assignment 1 to your tutor following this revision. You may choose to post your revised presentation for others in the class to view on the Moodle Conference site.

5. You may present your revised presentation to the target audience.