Students' and experts' perspectives on three learning and teaching activities

doi:10.1016/j.nepr.2014.03.002

Nurse Education in Practice

Volume 14, Issue 5, September 2014, Pages 449-454

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2014.03.002 Get rights and content

Abstract

Nursing is a profession that closely related to human life, and nurses are required to demonstrate critical thinking and creativity in providing health care services. However, traditional teaching approaches usually limit students' autonomy and freedom of expressing their thoughts and feelings. In order to develop the corresponding competence of nursing students, I adopted three teaching innovations, namely writing poems, composing songs, and using role plays in a nursing problem-based learning class in a university in Hong Kong. According to students' reflective notes and comments from two international expert reviewers, participating in these activities is a valuable experience and students were able to develop clinical reasoning, empathy, team spirit, motivation to learn, creativity, and ability to summarise and reconstruct knowledge. It is hoped that more innovative learning activities will be implemented, to prepare professional and ethical nurses in the future. It is also hoped that this study could provide other PBL educators some insights in innovative problem-based learning activities.

Introduction

Problem-based learning (PBL) becomes a popularly adopted learning and teaching strategy in medical and nursing education. However, little research has been conducted on the effectiveness of innovative activities in PBL class in Asian context. Although traditional curriculum stressed heavily on conventional didactic teaching style, many educational research studies, such as de Kock et al., 2004, Murphy et al., 2011 and Walker et al. (2010) have already promoted the implementation of student-driven approaches. These studies suggested a new definition of teacher and student roles, in the sense that teachers should be more proactive to take care of students' personal and professional goals, as well as their cognitive needs and diversity. Based on a qualitative part of a mixed-method educational research study, this paper aims to explore the outcomes of three teaching innovations, namely writing poems, composing songs, and using playing, in a nursing PBL class, especially on the development of students' creativity and critical thinking capacity.

Section snippets

Background

This section is organised into two sub-themes: (i) Problem-based learning (PBL) and nursing education; and (ii) the three teaching innovations used in this study, in order to identify the important gaps and lay the foundation for undertaking this study.

Sample

A total of 38 students at year one to two were recruited via convenience sampling from two in-class PBL theory courses in a school of nursing at a university. The researcher served as their facilitator and adopted three teaching innovations, namely writing poems, composing songs, and using role-plays, to assist in student learning process and promote more diverse and creative pedagogical activities. Students were allocated in four groups with four to five members.

Research approach

This paper focuses on the

Results

In this section, students' poem, song, and role play script, as well as their reflective notes are presented. Expert reviewers' narrative reports of analysing the roles of these three activities in developing students' critical thinking and creativity will be provided in the Discussion section.

Discussion

In this section, the two expert reviewers' narrative examples are presented and analysed. The trustworthiness and limitations of the entire study are also mentioned.

Conclusions

Nursing is a profession closely related to human life. In order to provide hope and professional care to clients, nurses should acquire competence in both arts and sciences (Baker, 2000). In this study, three innovative learning activities, namely writing poems, composing songs, and using role plays were adopted in a nursing PBL class. According to participated students' reflective notes and comments from two international expert reviewers, students enjoyed the learning process and found it

Author's contributions

ZC conceived and designed the study, drafted the manuscript, and contributed to editing the final manuscript and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of interest

None

Source of funding

The study was funded by Learning and Teaching Committee of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Project Code: 1.53.xx.465D).

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View full text

Students' and experts' perspectives on three learning and teaching activities

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Background

Sample

Research approach

Results

Discussion

Conclusions

Author's contributions

Conflict of interest

Source of funding

J. Prof. Nurs.

Nurse Educ. Pract.

Nurse Educ. Pract.

Nurse Educ. Pract.

Nurse Educ. Pract.

Clin. Simul. Nurs.

Nurse Educ. Today

Assessing educational quality: Knowledge production and the role of experts

Being a student again: a narrative study of a teacher's experience

Teach. High. Educ.

Uncertainty in nursing practices

J. Clin. Nurs.

Reading plays to learn qualitative data analysis: the example of death of a salesman

J. Adv. Nurs.

Creativity in advertising design education: an experimental study

Instr. Sci.

Patients' perspectives on diabetes health care education

Health Educ. Res.

Practice and professional issues

J. Psychol. Christianity

New learning and the classification of learning environments in secondary education

Rev. Educ. Res.

Using Nursing Research: Process, Critical Evaluation, and Utilization

The relation between assessment practices and outcomes of studies: the case of research on prior knowledge

Rev. Educ. Res.