Abstract
Background: Nursing students need opportunities for authentic learning in contexts that strongly resemble real-life clinical settings.Objective: This qualitative study describes final year nursing students’ experiences of simulation authenticity and presents development needs proposed by the students. The study aimed at producing knowledge that can be used by educators and technology specialists to develop simulation pedagogy for acute nursing.Methods: Eleven final-year nursing students specializing in acute nursing (intensive care and in- and out-of-hospital emergency care) responded to a questionnaire with four open questions in December 2019. Inductive content analysis was used to analyze the data.Results: The students stressed the importance of their own preparations and living into the nursing role with proper briefing from an expert teacher, supported by a realistic representation of the setting using real equipment, actors, visualization and other multisensory cues.Conclusions: Students’ subjective experience of authenticity depends on many factors; preparation, awareness of objectives, support from the facilitator and the level of environmental fidelity. Simulations, which reach a reasonable degree of authenticity in the students’ experience, can be considered an effective form of authentic learning.
Highlights
Nurse educators have striven to offer their students high quality clinical learning experiences
Nursing students need opportunities for authentic learning in contexts that strongly resemble real-life clinical settings. This qualitative study describes final year nursing students’ experiences of simulation authenticity and presents development needs proposed by the students
The study aimed at producing knowledge that can be used by educators and technology specialists to develop simulation pedagogy for acute nursing
Summary
Nurse educators have striven to offer their students high quality clinical learning experiences. The purpose of simulation is to repli- in nursing education proposes that active engagement in cate essential aspects of a clinical situation.[10] It can be said dialogue, argumentation, collaboration, co-operation and rethat the purpose of simulated scenarios is to authentically search, led by a critical and creative facilitator, results in the mimic real clinical practice in a safe environment.[11] In development of higher order metacognitive skills (i.e. knowltechnical terms, simulators can involve a variety of simulated edge, monitoring and regulation of the learners’ own thinking equipment and environments, for example part-task train- processes) This dynamic, cyclic and collaborative learning ers, patient simulators and various software.[12] Simulation process, triggered by ambiguity, uncertainty and cognitive has been seen as a dynamic process with an authentic dissonance, is seen to encourage students to co-create their representation of reality. Reflection and the feedback discussion have an essential role in simulation pedagogy.[13]
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