The first step of evidence-based practice is posing a well-built question. Many authors who teach evidence-based practice skills say that teaching practitioners how to pose well-built questions presents their single most challenging problem. This two-hour workshop will summarize literature across the helping professions to document the extent and nature of the problem. We will define well-built questions by concept, examples, and by operaiton (by applying elements in a question-type by question-element grid). Participants will practice posing questions in small groups with assistance from each other and workshop presenters. Participants will receive definitions of common errors in questions (e.g. dog from two towns problem--meaning mixing elements of a research question and a clinical question); then they will practice detecting and correcting errors in example questions.

The second step in evidence-based practice is taking a properly structured question, translating its various components into search terms, and developing a search strategy that is most likely to yield a set of ‘hits' that are both inclusive of current best evidence and are parsimonious. Participants will observe a ‘live' search of a single question using an assortment of techniques and will have the opportunity to compare approaches. Specifically, strategies for choosing search criteria, methodologic filters, and ordering of terms will be explored and compared.