The effectiveness of teaching strategies for creativity in a nursing concepts teaching protocol on the creative thinking of two-year RN-BSN students.

Abstract

Because of changes in the medical environment, nurses must maintain the ability of divergent thinking to solve the health problems of patients. However, many nurses whose work in clinical practice has become routine have lost the ability of creativity. To cultivate nurses creativity should be a goal of nursing education. The purpose of this study is to evaluate a nursing concepts teaching protocol by utilizing teaching strategies directed toward creativity to promote creativity in two-year RN-BSN students. This study design is a time series and one group experiment utilizing multiple instances of treatment. Teaching strategies for creativity were applied to a teaching unit and 52 two-year RN-BSN students were tested for creativity before the end of each semester. This study was conducted from March, 1999 to May, 2000, but only 30 students completed all tests and reached a 58% return rate. Torrance s (1974) definitions of creativity includ fluency, flexibility, and uniqueness were followed and the instrument, a questionnaire on Creativity in the application of the Nursing Process Tool (CNPT), was designed based on Emerson (1988). The content validity of Chinese-version CNPT was.79. The inter-coder reliability between two researchers was.84 following a coding guide that ten nursing education experts had established. The results indicated that 30 two-year RN-BSN students had improved fluency and flexibility. The improvements reached a significant level after the third semester. Only uniqueness declined. It is suggested that nursing faculty apply teaching strategies uniqueness more often in a teaching protocol of nursing concepts. By utilizing teaching strategies of creativity in a teaching protocol of nursing concepts, it is expected that two-year RN-BSN students can acquire characteristics of creativity for problem-solving skills in clinical settings.