Review
Meaningful and engaging teaching techniques for student nurses: A literature review

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Abstract

Helping undergraduate nursing students to contextualise theory learnt in the classroom to their professional practice can be challenging for nurse educators. This article provides a critical review of contemporary literature that explores strategies and techniques that nurse educators within university settings have adopted to address this challenge. This review was conducted as part of a broader research project that involved interviewing nurse educators to explore how they attempt to make their teaching meaningful and engaging for student nurses. The data was analysed using thematic analysis and the intention is to share the wealth of ideas gleaned with other nurse educators, including in the form of an evidence-based inventory of teaching approaches found to be effective in enhancing the meaningfulness and engagement of content to nursing learners.

Introduction

For many nursing students coming into what they see as a very practical discipline, the ability to be able to readily apply what they are expected to learn, to what they see as practice (often based upon a relative lack of experience of practice) is paramount. These ideas are supported by Knowles (1984) who suggests that andragogy “the art and science of helping adults learn” is distinct from pedagogy, whilst acknowledging although the two terms do not have to be dichotomous. Adult learners need to be able to see the relevancy of content but also need to be engaged by a variety of teaching techniques as do child learners.

Nurse educators share the view that undergraduate students are often only really willing to engage with topics if they can see the implications of and/or the application to their practice and this is only achieved if nurse educators deliver content in a meaningful and engaging way that links theory to practice.

This review is aimed at identifying what the literature says about teaching undergraduate nursing students' in ways that are meaningful and/or engaging. It has been undertaken as part of a broader project attempting to access the store of knowledge and expertise held by experienced nurse educators before they retire and it is lost forever so that insights can be shared in an educational format for less experienced nurse educators. In this project, nurse educators were interviewed and then a thematic analysis was undertaken, to explore ways they attempt to make their teaching as meaningful and engaging for undergraduate nursing students as possible. The aim over time is to create a repository of teaching techniques that can be employed by nurse educators to engage nursing students in meaningful ways.

Section snippets

Search strategy

The ERIC (educational content), PROQUEST (multidisciplinary content) and CINAHL (Nursing/health content) databases were interrogated using various combinations of the following search terms – ‘meaning*, AND engag*, AND nurs*, student’. The initial search yielded 1798 papers, this was limited to 205 by applying review or scholarly articles only, published within the last ten years. Further simple elimination took place based on skim reading the abstracts and to see which were germane to the

Current issues within nursing education

Nursing education is a constantly changing and multifaceted field, characterised by a tension between theory and practice. As a result, like all clinical and practice based disciplines, nursing education is tasked with finding a balance between theoretical content and practical use of that content. As such, nursing educators are often pressed to contextualise, and make meaningful and engaging, the theoretical material that they cover so that students are able to explicitly map the connection

Growing interest in meaningful and engaging teaching techniques

There has been a growing interest, in nursing education across the globe, in relation to the study of new teaching techniques that focus on linking theory with practice. This is supported by the literature, with all of the 55 articles selected for this review, ranging from different journals, institutions and countries, discussing in some way the use or development of these kinds of teaching techniques. Within the literature, evidence of institutional, national and international studies into

Teaching techniques

As part of a larger project to rectify the situation that a compendium of ‘meaningful and engaging’ teaching techniques for nurse educators has not yet been developed, a review of the literature was conducted to explore what techniques are currently utilised by nurse educators to deliver meaningful and engaging education (as they see it) to undergraduate nursing students. This will provide a sound basis for attempts at collating these types of teaching techniques in the future.

Seven separate

Conclusion

One of the characteristics of adult education proposed by the foundational author on andragogy (Knowles, 1984) is that adults are relevancy orientated, this was corroborated from a review of the literature as it became clear that nursing students need to be taught in a way that emphasises the practical use of the information that they glean in the classroom so that they can become more engaged with the content. Much of the literature argues that for this to be achieved new methods of teaching

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    1

    Patrick Crookes is visiting Professor at University of Huddersfield (UK) and University of Stavanger (Norway). Tel.: +61 2 4221 4208; fax: +61 2 4221 4718.

    2

    Kenneth Walsh is visiting Professor at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. Tel.: +61 2 4221 3472; fax: +61 2 4221 4718.

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