Diagnostic testing of nursing students' arithmetic skills

Abstract

Calculate the percentage strength when 2 ml of disinfectant concentrate is made up to one litre with water. ALL SKILLS are improved with practice. The skills may be in medicine, in music, in mathematics, in sport, or in: any other field of endeavour; but in all cases, the greater the amount of practice, the more the skill is developed. Conversely, lack of practice means that some of the skill is lost. The longer the time since the skill was last used, the less efficient is the practitioner in that area. About two years ago, I was asked by the publishers, Churchill Livingstone, to write a book on arithmetic for nurses. The request for such a publication had come initially from nurse educators who were concerned about the difficulties nursing students encountered when attempting simple computations. This book is now published under the title Nursing Calculations. The specification for the work included a revision of some basic arithmetic. This may seem surprising when most nursing students have passed a mathematics subject at senior secondary school level. However, depending on the course, mathematics at this level may include very little arithmetic. All students should have been taught the relevant arithmetic at some stage of their schooling, but many of them will have forgotten the skills, due to a lack of recent practice. The first chapter of Nursing Calculations comprises a diagnostic arithmetic test and revision exercises. The diagnostic test is an important feature of the book and is directly related to the revision. On completion and correction of the test, students are directed to those revision exercises which correspond with their errors in the test. Printed overleaf is a sample diagnostic arithmetic test. This test, and that published in Nursing Calculations, are parallel tests, using similar questions to test a particular skill. To use a very simple example: 487 x 100 and 293 x 100 both test the same skill of multiplying a three-digit number by 100. The diagnostic test given overleaf, like the diagnostic test and revision exercises in the book, is based only on the arithmetical skills required in nursing. The tests and exercises were prepared by first analysing the arithmetic of the different types of calculations.