Role of Skill Laboratory Training in Medical Education - Students’ Perspective

Implementation of active learning methods by nurse educators in undergraduate nursing students' programs - a group interview

BACKGROUND

Modern and active learning methods form an important part in the education of Nursing students. They encourage the development of communication and critical thinking skills, and ensure the safe health care of patients. Our aim was to obtain naturalistic data from nurse educators regarding want the use and effects of implementing active learning methods (Peyton's Four-Step Approach, Mind Mapping, Debriefing and Objective Structured Clinical Examination methods) in the study process of students of Nursing after a completed education module, Clinical skills of mentors, as part of the Strengthening Nursing in Bosnia and Herzegovina Project. We wish to learn about the perception of nurse educators regarding the use of active learning methods in the study process of Nursing in the future.

METHODS

Qualitative research was conducted and a group interview technique was used for data collection. Beforehand, research participants were included in a two-day education module, Clinical skills of mentors, as part of the Strengthening Nursing in Bosnia and Herzegovina Project. Content analysis of the discussion transcriptions was conducted.

RESULTS

Fourteen nurse educators participated. Group interviews were conducted in September 2019. The obtained categories form four topics: (1) positive effect on the development of students' communication skills (2) positive effect of learning methods on the development of students' critical thinking skills (3) ensuring a safe learning environment (4) implementation of active learning methods.

CONCLUSIONS

The use of various active learning methods in simulation settings improves the Nursing students' critical thinking and communication skills. Therefore, we believe that Peyton's Four-Step Approach, Mind Mapping and Debriefing methods should be included as tools for effective student learning and as preparation for directly performing safe nursing interventions with a patient. Effective approaches to the assessment of Nursing students may ensure quality patient health care in accordance with the vision of the nursing profession.

Student nurses' knowledge acquisition on oral medication administration: comparison of lecture demonstration vs. video demonstration

Background

Oral Medication administration is one of the paramount nursing procedures, where nurses must pay their utmost commitment. The vital aims are to reduce medication errors and ensure patient safety. The objectives of this study were to evaluate whether the nursing students could learn and retain the basic guidelines for oral medication administration when they are taught using a video-assisted teaching method compared with the lecture-demonstration method and to assess the students’ attitudes towards the two types of teaching methods.

Methods

This study was conducted as a quasi-experimental study with a pre and post-test design. Forty-five students in the first year of the bachelor’s degree in nursing programme participated. All the participants completed a self- administered questionnaire, including socio demographic data and questions of oral medication administration. Subsequently, participants were randomly assigned to two groups. Oral medication administration procedure was taught using two different teaching methods. Finally, the post-test knowledge scores of both groups were assessed and analysed using the paired-sample t-test.

Results

The results revealed that there was no significant difference in terms of age, gender and type of residence of students in the two groups. When comparing the pre-test mean score and post-test mean score using paired sample t-test, there was a statistically significant difference in both video demonstration group (t = − 4.533, p < 0.001) and lecture-demonstration group (t = − 4.208, p < 0.001). Almost all the students obtained good knowledge scores regardless of the method used in teaching oral medication administration. However, when comparing post-test scores of both groups using an independent sample t-test, it was identified that there was no significant difference between the two groups. Therefore, it was difficult to identify which method was effective than the other. According to the student feedback obtained at the end of the study, 67% of them preferred to have more video demonstrations in their skills classes.

Conclusion

The results of this study suggested that oral medication administration can be effectively taught using lecture-demonstration and video-demonstration teaching methods.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12912-020-00527-6.