Journal
JOURNAL OF PROFESSIONAL NURSING
Volume 28, Issue 5, Pages 284-290Publisher
W B SAUNDERS CO-ELSEVIER INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.profnurs.2012.04.011
Keywords
Education research; Baccalaureate nursing education; Innovative teaching; Student engagement
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The purpose of this article is to present findings from a study which evaluated the effectiveness of a virtual community (an emerging pedagogical application) on student engagement and academic performance. Virtual communities mirror real-life through unfolding patient histories and relationship development over time. Students also become more engaged in learning by creating personally meaningful knowledge of a concept (Rogers & Stone, 2007). Virtual communities offer one teaching strategy to assist students in learning complex, health-related content in a contextualized manner. This quasi-experimental study involved first-semester baccalaureate nursing students enrolled in a course at two campuses of a nursing program at a large university in the Southwest. Three key strategies assessed the impact of the virtual community on student engagement and learning: third-party observational measurement, end-of-class student/faculty surveys, and use of knowledge items in student exams for the class. Significant differences between the control and experimental group were found regarding learning engagement and communication exchanges; the groups appeared similar in ratings of quality of instruction and academic performance. Use of virtual communities can help nursing educators address the recent Carnegie Foundation study's (Benner, Sutphen, Leonard & Day, 2010) counsel to implement pedagogies of contextualization in which theoretical and factual information about diseases and conditions are placed in the context of a patient's experience.
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