Nursing is a vital professional discipline that demands nurse students to equip themselves with better practical knowledge and experience for proper patient care. This favors a teaching strategy featuring various real life cases and opportunities that would help young nurse professional to appropriately transfer the knowledge to practical clinical situations (Mbirimtengerenji, & Adejumo, 2015). For example, experiential learning provides a fine hands on experience to nursing students by helping them to learn, apply the learning in the workplace and reflect upon the results for applying elsewhere in future (Beckem, & Watkins, 2012). Before selecting a suitable teaching strategy, it is important to consider several variables that influence the nursing students so that they can make most use of the teaching methods.
A study conducted among undergraduate nursing students at the University of Medical Sciences of Razavi has shown that ensuring a proper clinical learning environment to be the most important factor in deciding the clinical competence of students (Hakimzadeh, & et al., 2013). For instance, students were distracted by the improper behavior of senior and official nurses that significantly influenced their learning. Similarly, many students felt that a learning atmosphere that guaranteed emotional support and a sense of being treated as a junior colleague would have increased their learning ability. Also, the nursing students viewed that availability of enough classroom facilities to discuss their experience, and learning equipments were certain essential prerequisites for a good clinical learning environment.
Another study reports that the factor of curriculum considerably influenced the acquiring of clinical competency of nursing students (Mrunalini & Chandekar, 2015). The content of the curriculum, methods of teaching and evaluation, and the degree of relationship between the practical and theoretical courses are the important factors to be considered while designing the curriculum, according to the study. Students also suggeted that teaching strategies that use efffective and up to date teaching methods that are relevant to the curent clinical environments along with employing authentic assessemnt methods would increase their clinical competence.
References
Beckem, J. M., & Watkins, M. (2012). Bringing Life to Learning: Immersive Experiential
Learning Simulations for Online and Blended Courses. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 16 (5), 61-70.
Hakimzadeh, R., Ghodrati, A., Karamdost, N., Hossein, G., and Mirmosavi, J. (2013 ). Factors affecting the teaching-learning in nursing education. GSE Journal of education, ISSN: 2289-3970: 174-184
Mbirimtengerenji, N.D. and Adejumo, O. (2015) Utilization of the Teaching Strategies among Nurse Tutors in Malawi Nursing Colleges. Open Journal of Nursing, 5, 276-294. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojn.2015.53031
