Improving performance amongst nursing students through the discovery of discrepancies during simulation
Section snippets
Introduction/background
Discrepancy creation is a concept articulated by Organizational Psychologists to describe how employees strive to improve their individual performance. Phillips et al. (1996) describe how discrepancy creation involves either the measurement of current performance against a standard (negative discrepancy creation) or by driving achievement when an individual sets higher personal goals (positive discrepancy creation). Phillips et al. (1996) argue that until an individual has achieved the level of
Results
Participants in the study included 67 female student nurses (average age 24 years range 19–48 years) and 3 male student nurses (average age 25 years range 20–31 years). A total of 70 participants completed discrepancy discovery tools for all three simulation scenarios. All but one student identified discrepancies in their own performance during the simulation sessions. This data revealed a statistically significant difference between the students' self-reported performance and that of the
Discussion
The first research question in this study related to whether the structured de-brief following simulation allowed for the discovery of discrepancies in student performance. The results show that the most frequently identified discrepancies across all of the scenarios based on students selecting areas to action plan were awareness of anatomy and physiology, understanding of pharmacology and patient assessment and hand off (handover). A study by Dunn et al. (2012) explored the influence of
Conclusion
Discrepancy discovery can act as a catalyst for student learning with students appearing to prefer peer comparators over comparisons with students at a more advanced stage or qualified nurses. Given the limited opportunities for peer comparison within many contemporary nursing education programs, simulation can provide a useful vehicle for discrepancy discovery. While tools incorporating visual analogue scales may be useful in identifying performance and knowledge discrepancies their use
Conflicts of interest
None.
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