Download This PaperSkills Checklist Utilization and the Impact on Nursing Student Skill Acquisition of the Pediatric Physical Assessment
139 Pages Posted: 19 May 2020
Date Written: December 13, 2019
Abstract
Nurse educators have a short period of time to prepare a nursing student to enter the healthcare profession. New graduate nurses enter the healthcare field taking positions in high acuity, specialty areas in unprecedented numbers. One such specialty area is pediatrics. Baccalaureate nursing programs only include the pediatric patient in small amounts of the curriculum. This creates a challenge to prepare nursing students to manage pediatric patients that require more astute pattern recognition. Skills checklists are used to facilitate and evaluate the acquisition of the skill of pediatric physical assessment. The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition is used as a guiding framework. According to Benner (2004), a nursing student remains a novice throughout nursing school. Expectations by regulatory bodies, such as the Virginia Board of Nursing, have expectations for proficient clinicians prior to entering the clinical setting (Virginia Board of Nursing, 2017). This study evaluates the method of using a skill checklist as a formative and summative tool versus the traditional model of using solely as a summative tool to see which is more effective in developing skill acquisition.
Keywords: nursing students, formative skills checklist, summative skills checklist, skill acquisition
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation