Nursing Education and Evaluation Strategies for Oral Communication and Clinical Simulation Use
Clinical Simulations Use for Evaluation Strategy in Nursing Education, Technology-Based Patient Simulations for Evaluation in Nursing Education, Clinical Conferences In Nursing for Evaluation Purpose, Student Interviews and Case Presentation In Nursing Education for Evaluation, Oral Communication Methods As Evaluation Strategy In Nursing Education.
Oral Communication Methods as Evaluation Strategy in Nursing Education
Communication and information
sharing are common nursing tasks and important nursing skills. Oral communication strategies such as student interviews, case presentations, and clinical conferences provide evaluative opportunities. These can be used to assess the student’s ability to verbalize ideas and thoughts clearly.
In addition, these strategies allow faculty to assess a student’s critical thinking skills and pose questions to elicit more complex forms of thinking. Evaluation strategies identified as verbal communication methods are described in the following paragraphs.
Student Interviews and Case Presentation in Nursing Education for Evaluation
In simple interview format, faculty ask questions and students respond. These question-and-answer sessions provide faculty with the opportunity to probe for more detail from students and clarify misconceptions. Faculty can focus on asking “higher order” questions, moving beyond just factual recall, to better promote student critical thinking (Boswell, 2006).
Student case presentations, such as “bullet point” summaries of patient problems and care strategies, assist students in developing concise presentation skills. Faculty can provide feedback to students and obtain evaluative information about students’ thoughts and approaches for patient care.
Clinical Conferences in Nursing for Evaluation Purpose
Clinical conferences provide opportunities for students to integrate theory and practice in terms of their own clinical experiences. Questions, reflections, and discussion within conferences encourage critical thinking and allow for peer feedback. Debriefing of clinical experiences, similar to the debriefing of simulations, provides students with the opportunity to reflect and further cement learning.
As students debrief, they gain opportunity to assess what happened during their clinical care, compare this to accepted criteria, and consider how well they did. Conferences provide an opportunity for faculty to gauge students abilities to analyze data and critique plans. The multiple student participants in clinical conferences enable faculty to evaluate more than one student at a time.
Asking students to engage in goal setting for further learning is another important component of clinical conference debriefing (Bonnel & Smith, 2010). Interprofessional conferences are another form of clinical conference in which the process of problem solving, and decision making is a collaborative effort of the group.
Involving multiple health care disciplines, evaluation is concerned with the student’s active participation within the group and abilities to present ideas clearly in terms of the care plan for the patient. Increased focus on interprofessional education makes this an important time to address student abilities to clearly communicate and collaborate in problem solving with team members (Institute of Medicine, 2014). Students may find a degree of risk involved with sharing their knowledge and being critically evaluated by other disciplines.
Clinical Simulations Use for Evaluation Strategy In Nursing Education
Simulations can range from simple case role plays to interactions with complex electronic manikins. Through simulations an instructor can identify specific clinical objectives to be demonstrated and focus on student cognitive and psychomotor behaviors defined for the case. Simulations help to create a safe environment for student learning.
Benefits of simulations include skill validation in a standardized setting with no risk to actual patients (Harder, 2010; Jeffries, 2012). With the changing health care setting, students will likely not have opportunities to care for all types of patients in the various clinical settings for which they will be responsible after graduation.
Teaching pattern recognition with case studies and scenarios in safe, structured learning environments is becoming an increasingly important strategy. Sample approaches to simulations include technology-based patient simulations, role play and clinical scenarios, and standardized patient examinations.
Technology Based Patient Simulations for Evaluation in Nursing Education
Rapidly advancing technologies provide additional opportunities for clinical evaluation, including virtual case-based simulations and high-fidelity simulations. Virtual case-based simulations, with similarities to high-fidelity simulation, include web-based avatars in online simulated settings.
Avatars, a type of on-screen representation of students, placed in virtual health care settings provide a semi realistic learning experience for students to assume nursing roles, interact with a virtual patient, and make care decisions (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2014). Using interactive multimedia, these nursing case studies can be presented in a safe setting without clinical environmental distractions, or the risk involved in student clinical decision-making.
High-fidelity patient simulations involve more traditional clinical lab-supported activities around a patient being simulated. by technology. Benefits include that student skills can be demonstrated efficiently and that students have multiple opportunities for practice in a safe environment.
Novice nursing students reported gaining comfort and confidence for clinical care when using high-fidelity patient simulation as a learning tool (Bremner, Aduddell, Bennett, & VanGeest, 2006; Jeffries, 2012). Research findings regarding high-fidelity simulations as both teaching and evaluation tools are becoming increasingly available.
Meyer, Connors, Hou, and Gajewski (2011), for example, studied benefits of simulation on students’ traditional clinical performance using direct performance measures and comparison groups.
They found that students completing simulations prior to scheduled hospital clinical experience attained higher performance measures more quickly than the control group and maintained high performance levels. A model can be used to guide simulation development for both teaching–learning and testing purposes (Jeffries, 2005).
Faculty should clarify for students whether a simulation activity is formative (for teaching purposes) or summative (for outcomes evaluation). Debriefing and feedback to students, as formative evaluation, are considered to be critical elements in the teaching learning process with high fidelity patient simulation (Henneman & Cunningham, 2005; Issenberg, McGaghie , Petrusa , Gordon, & Scalese, 2005; Waznonis , 2014).
These debriefing sessions provide opportunity for students to gain insight into their performance and consider opportunities for improvement. High-fidelity patient simulators as mechanisms to document student competencies are taking on increasing importance in today’s health care settings.