Badging as Incentive to Complete Library Modules in the Curriculum: A Case Study

Objectives: Increase participation and completion of the library scavenger hunt, which was a practical learning module within a first semester medical school course that challenged students to engage with the library content and resources.

Methods: A scavenger hunt was incorporated into a first semester medical student course to meet the learning objectives of demonstrated competence in library navigation and searching, article retrieval, bibliometric support tools and Interlibrary Loan basics. Students were given access to content and provided instructions. They were then allowed to progress through the content and the scavenger hunt at their own pace. They were required to submit their completed scavenger hunt to the library. In order to increase the rate of response, a badge was created and awarded to everyone that had completed the scavenger hunt with their final submission.

This badge offered no other academic benefit beyond a printable certificate, bragging rights and recognition on an open access badging platform. Neither the total number nor which students earned the badge was known to any of the students at the time.

Results: While all the students completed the content, initially submission on their work on the scavenger hunt was lagging. After we created the badge and offered them recognition for their work, 63 of 90 students, over 2/3rds of the class, submitted their work for badge credit.

Conclusions: There are many skills related to library sciences that students often do not realize are important to acquire until they need them. In addition to formally integrating these elements into the curriculum, recognizing students who can demonstrate practical application of these skills is not only an important component of competence-based education, our experience demonstrates it is also motivating for students.