Nursing Student Awareness Using Contextual Module

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Increasing Undergraduate Nursing Student Confidence Using Contextual Modules
Teaching psychomotor skills is an essential component of nearly every nursing program. Although there are a variety of pedagogies used to teach nursing skills, the question remains: “How many times does a student need to perform a skill in order to have self confidence in their skill performance? “ Students desire to have self confidence in their skill performance and are often apprehensive about their skill competence when entering the workforce. Faculty often recognize the need for more skill practice but many times there are not enough resources to provide more clinical experiences where the skills can be practiced. Furthermore, Kimhi, E., Reishtein, J., Cohen, …show more content…

One factor that contributed to the development of the contextual modules was that clinical faculty had observed that students were only able to perform skills that were recently covered in the laboratory setting. Students were forgetting skills that were taught at the beginning of the semester and skill decay seemed to increase near the end of the semester where there were up to 8-10 weeks in between the teaching of the skill and the need to perform the skill in clinical. Students often needed to have faculty guidance in the clinical setting in order to perform skills safely and students would offer comments to suggest that they could not remember how to perform the skills. Faculty determined that students needed more psychomotor skill practice in order to have confidence in the clinical setting but there were challenges related to clinical site availability and faculty time which prevented additional clinical experiences to help build these skills. As a result of the identified need and challenges that were presented a strategy was developed to create contextual modules that would provide additional psychomotor skill practice for students. These modules were additional experiences in addition to the scheduled lab time where the students were introduced to the skills and were allowed to practice with faculty supervision and the modules did not …show more content…

In each course, five contextual modules were developed which corresponded with the exemplars in the courses. When students came to the lab to complete a module, they were each assigned a station with a manikin, patient care equipment and a computer. Each computer station was prepared with a PowerPoint presentation that provided a description of patient in an acute care setting and the presentation provided direction for the students. As the students progressed through the PowerPoint, they were directed to perform skills, complete assessments, make decisions, administer medications, and document on simulated electronic medical records which were hyperlinked throughout the presentation. Each of the documentation templates was created using Macros enabled Microsoft Word documents which mimicked a hospital electronic medical record. Each module provided the context for a different patient experience and resembled the typical workflow of an acute care setting. To prepare for the modules, students were provided with objectives which helped students anticipate which skills would likely be included in the modules. Psychomotor skills that were included in the modules varied from emptying a foley catheter drainage bag to tracheostomy suctioning. There was also a large focus on the administration of intravenous

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