Using an educational mobile application to teach students to take vital signs

Concordance of judgement: A tool to foster the development of professionalism in dentistry

INTRODUCTION

Developing professionalism notably involves learning how to make professional judgements in ambiguous situations. The Concordance of Judgement Test (CJT) is a learning tool that was proposed to develop professionalism competencies, but it was never performed in dentistry or used with a synchronous methodology. The present study evaluated the feasibility of the use of CJT in the context of dental education, to foster professionalism and stimulate reflexivity and discussion.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

After different steps of optimization, a questionnaire presenting 12 vignettes was submitted to 33 Canadian students. Second, after an additional optimization, a questionnaire of 7 vignettes was submitted to 87 French students. An immediate educational feedback was proposed after each vignette to promote reflexivity and discussions during the experience.

RESULTS

The overall experience of the students was reported as good, thanks to the feedback of real-life situations. This promoted reflexivity and stimulated discussion between students and educators regarding professionalism issues. The students considered CJT as a relevant and well-adapted tool, and reported positive feelings regarding the inter-university aspect of the activity. The mean score of the panel members was close to 80/100 and the mean score of the students was 5 to 10 points lower, which is in agreement with docimological performance.

CONCLUSION

The results suggested that the use of CJT in a synchronous way was a feasible and relevant tool to motivate the students to improve their professionalism, and to stimulate their reflexivity and discussion. The students reported positive experience with CJT, and we believe that this tool can be integrated in the dental curriculum.

The Effectiveness of Mobile Applications in Improving Nursing Students' Knowledge Related to Pressure Injury Prevention

The study's main goal was to compare the effects of a mobile application versus traditional methods of teaching on nursing students' acquisition of knowledge about pressure injury prevention. In addition, a secondary aim was to discover nursing students' viewpoints related to the advantages and disadvantages of using mobile applications as an educational method. A randomized controlled study design was implemented during November and December of 2023 in a nursing faculty with 60 undergraduate students in their second nursing year. A total of 30 students were assigned to the mobile application group, while the other 30 students were assigned to the traditional lecture group. The study was executed in three stages: pre-test, educational intervention, and post-test. The results of the study during the pre-test showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the mean scores of pressure injury themes between the two groups. However, the post-test scores for all PI themes were higher in the mobile application group compared to the traditional lecture group. Furthermore, five advantages of the mobile application were highlighted by students: "improvement of students' knowledge and skills", "self-confidence", "stress reduction", "enhancement of competence", and "stimulation of learning motivation". This study demonstrated the effectiveness of the mobile application method in enhancing nursing students' knowledge and prophylaxis of pressure injury. Therefore, the mobile application method is recommended as an innovative approach to teaching.

Learning practical nursing skills in simulation centers - A narrative review

Background

Practical skills are complex procedures integrating communication and caring, as well as technical and manual aspects. Simulation at a simulation/skills center offers a wide range of learning activities and aims to imitate patient situations.

Objectives

To investigate the international research literature on practical skills learning in simulation/skills centers in nursing education. Research questions: 1. What are the range and type of practical skills studied? 2. What learning activities are focused on in the studies included in the review? 3. What are the learning outcomes and how are they assessed?

Design

Narrative review.

Methods

We searched electronically and included studies from Medline Ovid, CINAHL, Eric, Embase, Academic Search Premiere, and Cochrane. Unique indexing terms and search strategies were developed for each database. The criteria for inclusion were bachelor nursing students as the study population and practical nursing skills learning in simulation/skills centers. We used Rayyan QCRIt for the initial screening and the Mixed Method Appraisal Tool for quality assessment. We used a narrative approach to synthesize the diverse range of studies.

Findings

One hundred and twenty-one studies from 26 countries published between January 2013 and March 2022 were included. The amount of quantitative research was overwhelming (n = 108). A total of 50 different practical skills were represented. The studies focused on which learning modalities resulted in the best learning outcomes. Only 8.5% (n = 7) of the included studies concerned students' learning processes. Skill performance (n = 101), knowledge (n = 57), confidence (n = 34), and satisfaction (n = 32) were the main learning outcomes measured.

Discussion

The quality assessment indicated that 10 of the studies achieved 100% on the mixed method appraisal tool criteria. In many of the studies with quasi-experimental and randomized controlled trial designs, the intervention group received some form of educational treatment while the control group received no treatment. The choice of no treatment for the control group in pedagogical research seems to disregard the inherent purpose and effect of teaching and learning.

Conclusion

Heterogeneity in the use of learning modalities and measuring instruments precludes the possibility of building on other research. Technical skills were the preferred choice of skill, while skills that involved a fair measure of communication and collaboration were only sparingly studied. Students' learning processes were barely touched on in the included studies. More focus should be placed on this area in further research, since the choice of learning modalities may affect the students' learning processes in significant ways.

Online Interactions: Mobile Text-Chat as an Educational Pedagogic Tool

The reactions of education systems to the global lockdowns implemented during the COVID-19 epidemic highlighted that there remain questions regarding how everyday technologies might be used to support mass education. This paper draws on Conversation Analysis in online textual communication to study key features of mobile text communication by analysing book discussions among adult students of an online reading programme. We captured and analysed three patterns of interaction (i.e., single linear conversations; intertwined conversations; trunk-branch conversations) as to their affordances for educational communication. This study shows that synchronous text has distinctive communicative features, including short text exchanges and various turn-taking patterns, which are different to the elaborated forms of discourse expected in schools. Though "disorder" and "messiness" accompanied the interactions, we take them as opportunities rather than challenges of education and suggest that appropriate pedagogic design may enable teachers to utilise this distinctiveness to develop various learning environments.

An MDRE approach to promoting students' learning performances in the era of the pandemic: A quasi-experimental design

Educators have indicated the need to foster students' ability to solve problems by acquiring up-to-date knowledge as well as promoting their competences for making decisions from diverse perspectives based on the acquired knowledge. Traditional courses mainly use lecture-based instruction without providing sufficient opportunities for students to practice and interact with the teacher; therefore, it is difficult to deliver such up-to-date knowledge via traditional instruction, not to mention fostering students' critical thinking. In this study, the Mobile technology-supported Decision, Reflection and Exercise (MDRE) model is proposed to address this problem. Moreover, a learning system is developed based on the proposed approach. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a quasi-experiment was conducted in a university with a two-group pretest posttest design to assess participants' learning achievement, critical thinking and learning satisfaction. The participants were two classes of undergraduate students. One class with 37 students was the experimental group learning with the MDRE learning approach, whereas the other class with 37 students was the control group learning with the conventional technology-based learning approach. Analysis of covariance was performed to evaluate the effect of the intervention on the target outcomes. It was found that the experimental group showed better learning achievement, critical thinking and learning satisfaction than the control group. This implies that the MDRE approach has good potential in helping learners think from diverse perspectives and promoting their learning performance and engagement, which is important in higher education aimed at fostering students' competence of acquiring up-to-date knowledge for solving problems.