Effect of guided reciprocal peer questioning strategy on pediatric nursing students' self-esteem and metacognitive awareness: Current approach and future directions

BACKGROUND

Guided Reciprocal Peer Questioning Strategy (GRPQS) restructures the classroom context from a passive into an engaging environment, where the students are empowered to actively participating in their learning process.

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the impact of GRPQS on the pediatric nursing students' self-esteem and metacognitive awareness.

DESIGN

A Quasi-experimental, pre-posttest, two groups research was carried out at University of Bahrain. A sample of 89 out of 112 pediatric nursing-students were divided into two groups.

METHOD

Through GRPQS, the students mutually generated and responded to questions, activated their critical thinking, elicited ideas, and shared learning experiences within the team and the teachers act as facilitators.

RESULTS

It is revealed that 75% of the students in the study group developed high self-esteem after their engagement in the GRPQS compared to only 48.8% among those in the control one. Students who practiced GRPQS showed an improvement in their knowledge about cognition. As the mean score of students in the study group is increased from 2.16 ± 0.45 to 2.89 + 0.35 for the procedural knowledge, from 2.33 ± 0.56 to 2.86 ± 0.41 for declarative and from 2.18 + 0.53 to 3.09 ± 0.29 for the conditional knowledge (p < 0.001 for each). Concerning the regulation of cognition, the mean score of the planning dimension was improved from2.21 ± 0.46 to 3.10 ± 0.31 among the students in the study group. Moreover, it is clear that applying GRPQS in the lectures helped in improving the students' information management strategies, comprehension monitoring, debugging strategies and evaluation (p < 0.001 for each) compared to the control group p = 0.169, p = 0.009, p = 0.117 and 0.887 respectively).

CONCLUSION

The application of GRPQS provided an interactive and engaging learning experience that helped the students to develop the habit of organizing, judging, and summarizing information as well as focusing on the significant portions of the learning materials. Moreover, exchanging questions between the nursing students was effective in enhancing their self-esteem and metacognitive awareness. Hence, incorporating this innovative pedogeological approach in the nursing curricula is recommended.

Using branching path simulations in critical thinking of pain management among nursing students: Experimental study

BACKGROUND

Nursing education has to promote nursing students' critical thinking skills especially those who are going to work with people with dementia suffering from pain. Therefore, nursing education needs to incorporate new and effective teaching methods in nursing curricula for critical thinking skills promotion. Branching path simulation is an interactive learning tool which helps students; (1) to make decisions about treatment options for patients and get feedback immediately and (2) to demonstrate and promote their critical thinking skills in a safe and supported environment before dealing with complex and real-life case scenarios.

OBJECTIVES

The present study aimed to examine the effectiveness of branching path simulation in promoting the critical thinking skills of undergraduate nursing students.

METHODS

This an equivalent control group pretest-posttest experimental study was done in 2019 on 102 undergraduate nursing students who had registered in both practical and theoretical courses of Advanced Adult Health Nursing. A pretest posttest experimental design with concurrent control group and random assignment to the treatment/nontreatment variable was used and a convenience sample of 102 nursing students was recruited in this study. The students were randomly assigned and divided into two equal intervention and control groups and each group attended different training sessions. The control group was trained by traditional lectures while the intervention group was trained by branching path simulation. The researcher used a demographic questionnaire and the Critical Thinking Self-Assessment Scale (CTSAS) for data collection.

RESULTS

After the training sessions, the mean scores of the CTSAS and its subscales domain in the intervention group were significantly higher than the control group.

CONCLUSIONS

Branching path simulation is an effective teaching method to promote students' critical thinking skills. Future studies are recommended to examine the effect of branching path simulation on other nursing students learning outcomes.