Nursing Students' Mindsets and Choice of Learning Strategies

Achievement Goal Theory and Mindsets: Keys for Competency Development in Nursing

BACKGROUND

Many nursing schools are transitioning to a competency-based model due to the increasing complexity of medical information, skills, task acuities, and cognitive overload.

PROBLEM

Nursing faculty may not be familiar with the synergy between achievement goal theory and the growth mindset (GM) model to prepare nursing students within a competency-based model effectively.

APPROACH

This article presents a persuasive argument for how integrating achievement goal theory and the GM model could effectively foster mastery goals essential for competency development.

CONCLUSIONS

Mastery goals, a component of the GM model, can be used as tangible indicators for assessing and evaluating competency development.

Integrating wellness into curricula using the ten dimensions of wellness as a framework

Burnout is a public health crisis that persists at the expense of clinician well-being, the healthcare workforce, and the quality of care provided. Clinician well-being is a professional imperative, yet nursing students still report higher levels of burnout than non-nursing students. Cultivating an academic learning environment that supports the development of resiliency, well-being, and improved student mental health requires a coordinated and sustained effort from nurse educators and academic leaders. This article aims to inspire nurse educators to take the first or next steps toward integrating wellness into nursing curricula. The ten dimensions of wellness provide a framework for wellness programming. Practical strategies aligned with each dimension are offered. As an exemplar, the Banding Together for Wellness program is summarized, including innovative incentives for student participation. Over the past five years, 426 (approximately 54 %) undergraduate nursing students voluntarily completed the program. While best practices may vary by institution, the strategies and resources offered herein can support nurse educators in the classroom, lab, and clinical setting as we all work to foster personal and professional well-being in nursing students. Nurse educators can be instrumental in cultivating the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for life-long self-care, well-being, and nursing practice.

Online Mindset Training for Prelicensure Nursing Students: A Randomized Longitudinal Study

Introduction

Research suggests students with a growth mindset are more successful. Utilizing Dweck's growth mindset model, the study explored the benefits of mindset training within nursing education.

Objective

To determine the impact of an online mindset training intervention on first-semester prelicensure nursing students' mindset beliefs and learning and studying strategies.

Methods

This study employed a randomized longitudinal design, conducted entirely online. Sixty-eight participants completed all phases of the study. Data were collected using the Williams Inventory of Learning Strategies tool before and after participants viewed an online training.

Results

Findings indicate that online mindset training positively influenced student learning, reducing fear of failure and increasing willingness to remediate.

Conclusion

These results highlight the promising impact of an online learning approach in fostering a growth mindset among nursing students; suggesting the potential for integrating mindset training into the nursing curriculum to enhance student success, with recommendations for further research in larger-scale studies.

From safety net to trampoline: elevating learning with growth mindset in healthcare simulation

The Implicit Theory of Mindset proposes two different mindsets that sit at opposite ends of a spectrum: a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. With a fixed mindset, an individual believes they are born with a certain amount of an attribute, and so their potential is both pre-determined and static. With a growth mindset, an individual believes their attributes are malleable and can strengthen over time with repeated effort, adaptable learning strategies, and challenge seeking. Adoption of a growth mindset is associated with improved academic success, more effective learning strategies, increased resilience in the face of adversity, and better mental wellbeing.The theoretical underpinning of psychological safety resonates with the Implicit Theory of Mindset as it infers that a significant number of simulation participants have a fixed mindset and are therefore more likely to be fearful of making an error. The simulation community agree that participants need to feel comfortable making errors for simulation to be successful. The key word here is comfortable. Participants feeling comfortable to make errors just scratches the surface of adopting a growth mindset. With a growth mindset, participants see errors as a positive in the simulation experience, an inevitability of the learning process, evidence that they are adequately challenging themselves to improve.Encouraging adoption of a growth mindset in participants is a powerful addition to the establishment of psychological safety because a growth mindset will re-frame participants' experiences of social comparison from negative to positive and optimize information processing. We propose a novel idea: simulation educators should be explicit in the pre-brief about what a growth mindset is and its associated benefits to encourage its adoption during the simulation activity-a simulation growth mindset intervention. If this is not possible due to time constraints, an online module or article about growth mindset would be appropriate as pre-reading to encourage adoption of a growth mindset in participants. The message is not that a simulation growth mindset intervention should replace the focus on psychological safety but rather that it should be used synergistically to provide the highest quality simulation experience.