The integration and evaluation of a social-media facilitated journal club to enhance the student learning experience of evidence-based practice: A case study.

INTRODUCTION: Nurses are required to interpret and apply knowledge so communities will receive care based on best available evidence, as opposed to care that is simply based on tradition or authority. Fostering nursing students' critical appraisal skills will assist in their capacity to engage with, interpret and use best evidence. Journal clubs are frequently used approach to engage learners with research and develop critical appraisal skills. Given new flipped and blended approaches to teaching and learning there is need to rejuvenate how research is utilised and integrated within journal clubs to maximise engagement and translation of evidence. PURPOSE: This paper provides a case study of a single site Australian university experience of transitioning a traditional physical journal club, to a social media-facilitated club within a postgraduate health subject to stimulate and facilitate engagement with the chosen manuscripts. DATA SOURCES: This case study is based on our own experiences, supported by literature and includes qualitative comments obtained via student feedback surveys during November 2015. DESIGN: Case study. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING AND CONCLUSION: Social media-facilitated journal clubs offer an efficient way to continue developing critical appraisal skills in nursing students. The integration of a social media-facilitated journal clubs increased student attention, engagement with presented activities and overall student satisfaction within this evidence-based practice subject. Future rigorously-designed, large-scale studies are required to evaluate the impact of online journal clubs on the uptake of evidence-based practice, including those resulting in improved patient outcomes.

Students working with multiple conflicting documents on a scientific issue: relations between epistemic cognition while reading and sourcing and argumentation in essays.

BACKGROUND: There is burgeoning research within educational psychology on both epistemic cognition and multiple-documents literacy, as well as on relationships between the two constructs. AIM: To examine relationships between epistemic cognition concerning the justification of knowledge claims and sourcing and argumentation skills. SAMPLE: Participants were 51 Norwegian undergraduates. METHOD: Three dimensions of justification were identified in think-aloud protocols based on students' reading of six documents presenting conflicting claims on the controversial scientific issue of cell phone radiation and health risks: justification by authority, personal justification and justification by multiple sources. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were performed to examine the unique predictability of these dimensions for essay performance after removing variance associated with prior knowledge about the topic of the documents. RESULTS: After controlling for topic knowledge, justification by multiple sources uniquely predicted students' sourcing and argumentation in essays that they wrote after reading the documents, with students trying to justify knowledge claims by corroborating across several sources of information more likely to include explicit source citations, link sources and contents, and display better, more integrated argumentation in their essays. CONCLUSION: Findings are considered in the light of a theoretical framework for multiple-documents literacy adapted to the domain of science, and both theoretical and educational implications are discussed.