Swedish student nurses solving mathematical items with or without help of a hand-held calculator – a comparison of results

Abstract

Drug dosage calculations can be worrying for student nurses. Every nursing education programme therefore presupposes knowledge of basic mathematics. A well-tried and validated mathematical test was given to two groups of beginner student nurses. The purp ose of this paper is to compare the results on the diagnostic mathematical test between student nurses who used a hand-held calculator and student nurses who worked without a calculator.The results showed that student nurses who carried out the test using a calculator correctly solved considerably more items than the other group. A separate analysis of rote learning items versus concept learning items was performed. This study gave evidence that student nurses will increase their ability to solve mathematical problems, comparable to the type and level of difficulty found in drug dosage calculations, using a calculator. Therefore, all future teaching and examinations during the nursing education programme should permit the use of calculators.