Using a competency-based approach to patient education: achieving congruence among learning, teaching and evaluation.

Millions of Americans are living with, and managing, their chronic health problems. Patient education plays an essential role in promoting safe self-management practice. To ensure that patients attain the required abilities, patient education needs to be competency-based. When developing and applying a competency-based patient education lesson/program, each nurse must answer questions concerning essential competencies, optimal teaching methods, best method to evaluate patient achievement, and documentation of evidence. This article describes how the authors used these questions as a guide to achieve congruence among intended learning, instruction, and evaluation to design and implement a patient education program, Managing Heart Failure, at a local hospital.

The Revised Bloom's Taxonomy: implications for educating nurses.

One of the essential goals for continuing education in nursing is to enhance nurses' ability to improve patient care outcomes. Toward this goal, learners need to transfer learned knowledge to actual practice. Achieving effective transfer requires knowledge of thinking paradigms in relation to specific subject content. Educators can facilitate knowledge transfer by developing instructional designs that incorporate subject content and cognitive processes related to the use of the subject content. However, it is difficult to develop such instructional designs. The Revised Bloom's Taxonomy provides a framework for meeting this educational need. In this article, the authors establish the relevance of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy to continuing education and describe how to use the taxonomy to plan an educational session with an emphasis on promoting knowledge transfer.

Direct teaching of thinking skills using clinical simulation.

Because of the nursing faculty shortage, many academic leaders hire clinicians who are not formally prepared for an academic role. Novice faculty face an immediate need to develop teaching skills. One of the most crucial areas is the ability to help students develop critical thinking. To address this need, the authors describe how they used clinical simulation to incorporate direct teaching of thinking skills into course content and how this resulted in a faculty mentoring experience.

The effect of meditation on physical and mental health in junior college students: a quasi-experimental study.

BACKGROUND: Physical stress and mental stress are increasingly common phenomena in our rapidly changing and stressful modern society. Research has found meditation to produce positive and demonstrable stress reduction effects on brain and immune functions. This study is grounded in traditional Chinese philosophical mores that teach a process summarized by the keynote activities of "calm, still, quiet, consider, and get" and the potential of this process to reduce stress in adolescents. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of meditation on the physical and mental health of junior college students. METHODS: This research employed a quasi-experimental design. Participants included 242 freshmen from a junior college in Taiwan selected using a convenience sampling technique. Participants were then randomly separated into experimental (n = 119) and control (n = 123) groups. The project duration was 18 weeks, during which the experimental group received 2 hours of meditation treatment per week, for a total of 36 hours. Both groups completed pretest and posttest Life Adaptation Scale forms, which included questionnaires addressing information on physical and mental distress and positive and negative coping strategies. Data were analyzed using analysis of covariance. RESULTS: Findings showed that the effect of the experiment treatment was significant when student physical and mental distress pretest scores were controlled. Physical and mental symptoms in the experimental group were lower than those in the control group. CONCLUSIONS: Meditation can help students to adapt to life stressors. This study also provides support for traditional Chinese wisdom, which promotes meditation as one way to improve health.

Designing multiple-choice test items at higher cognitive levels.

In the midst of a nursing faculty shortage, many academic institutions hire clinicians who are not formally prepared for an academic role. These novice faculty face an immediate need to develop teaching skills. One area in particular is test construction. To address this need, the authors describe how faculty from one course designed multiple-choice test items at higher cognitive levels and simultaneously achieved congruence with critical-thinking learning objectives defined by the course.

Writing context-dependent item sets that reflect critical thinking learning outcomes.

Faculty in a medical-surgical nursing course developed learning outcomes to foster critical thinking skills involved in clinical reasoning. To facilitate students' abilities to make effective clinical judgments, direct teaching of thinking skills was incorporated into nursing content instruction. This instructional design challenged faculty to develop test items that would permit direct observation of students' thought processes. The author describes how context-dependent item sets were developed to meet this evaluation need.

Using the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy in the clinical laboratory: thinking skills involved in diagnostic reasoning.

Achieving effective transfer of theoretical knowledge to clinical practice requires knowledge of thinking paradigms in relation to specific nursing content. It is a challenge to develop instructional designs for teaching and assessing implicit thought processes involved in clinical reasoning. The authors demonstrate the use of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy to teach thinking skills involved in diagnostic reasoning in a clinical laboratory.

Applying the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy to a medical-surgical nursing lesson.

The Revised Bloom's Taxonomy provides a 2-dimensional framework for classifying cognitive learning. Classifying learning objectives by knowledge type in relation to cognitive process helps educators obtain a better understanding about intended learning, and enables them to design appropriate instruction and assessment methods. The authors demonstrate use of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy to achieve congruence among intended learning, instructional activities, and assessment methods while teaching diagnostic reasoning for clients with myocardial infarction.

[The collaborative nursing care plan: integration of the clinical pathway with the traditional nursing care plan].

The nursing care plan is a commonly used teaching tool in nursing education. By developing individualized nursing care plans for specific clients, students practice use of nursing process and making clinical judgments and decisions. However, the system of managed care has impacted current clinical practice, and many health care agencies have shifted their emphasis from requiring the traditional columnar nursing care plans to use of clinical pathways and standards of care. As result of this trend, nursing educators are faced with the problem of preparing students to cope with today's reality in clinical practice. In response to this problem, this article reexamines the practical utility of the traditional nursing care plan in nursing education. The article also introduces a collaborative nursing care plan, the integration of the clinical pathway with the traditional nursing care plan, and its application in teaching.