Research BriefThe Effects of vSIM for Nursing™ as a Teaching Strategy on Fundamentals of Nursing Education in Undergraduates
Section snippets
Background
Fundamentals of Nursing, providing content in the basic practical skills, knowledge, communication strategies, and beginning pharmacology, is the first course in which students learn how to perform nursing skills to patients. However, students are novices in their psychomotor skills and may feel not well prepared when facing patients (Stroup, 2014). Additionally, they may have no chance to practice their skills fully in the clinical area due to the decreased clinical placement opportunities (
Sample
In a bachelor program for nursing in a university located at a central city in China, all the second-year students enrolled in Fundamentals of Nursing course were invited to participate in the program. In total, 28 students consented to participate, and informed consent was then obtained. None of the students had previously taken the course or participated in simulation before.
Methods
A randomized control trail with a posttest-only design was implemented. Twenty-eight students were randomly assigned to either experimental group or control group. As a result, there were 14 students in each group. All the students completed regularly scheduled learning activities of the course together. Students in the experimental group received additional virtual simulation training on the vSIM for Nursing platform. Ten virtual cases for Fundamentals of Nursing were used including scenarios
Results
With one participant in the experimental group withdrawn from the study, 27 participants completed the whole procedure. After tests were completed, scores of knowledge and skill performances were evaluated by entering the data into SPSS, version 22.0 (IBM Corporation, Armonk, NY). Demographic data showed the mean age was 19.0 (SD = 0.58) years in the experimental group and 19.29 (SD = 0.73) years in the control group. The mean grade point average was 3.21 (SD = 0.15) in the experimental group
Discussion
This study used a novel nursing virtual simulation platform and compared regular learning activities to a combination of regular learning activities and virtual simulation for undergraduate nursing students' achievement of learning outcomes in Fundamentals of Nursing.
Students who received virtual simulation training achieved significant higher scores on the knowledge test. This finding supports the previous findings that virtual simulation may help to develop nursing knowledge (McCallum, Ness,
Conclusion
There are several limitations of this study. First, the vSIM for Nursing platform is developed in English which is a second-language for Chinese students. Second, the small sample size limited the generalization of the result. However, within this experimental framework using randomized and comparable samples, clear significant differences were found between the experimental group and the control group.
In conclusion, this study supported that vSIM for Nursing could improve undergraduate nursing
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