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Working at the coal face: The contribution of Programme Tutors in supporting practice-based learning in nursing
This paper reports the findings of a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning-funded project to explore key features of effective support for pre-registration nursing students in practice settings.
Background
The cultivation of positive practice learning environments for students of nursing, including high quality learning support, has been long established as a thorny issue for nurse educators and practitioners. Indeed it was a key theme for the very first nursing research series, supported by the Royal College of Nursing, in the early 1980’s. This included Fretwell’s (1982) work on ward teaching and learning, Orton’s (1981) work on the ward learning environment and Ogier’s (1982) work on the role of the ward sister. Since then there has been an explosion of research in this area.
As a profession we have a responsibility to ensure high quality learning support for students in practice settings. If we do not, there will be wide-ranging implications for the quality of patient care, work-related stress, role satisfaction, retention and attrition and professional reputation. Given the significant investment in nurse education and the need to retain nurses in the workforce, it is unsurprising therefore that the practice learning environment has emerged as a key policy issue in the United Kingdom and internationally.
Previous research indicates that relationships between the learner and staff are crucial in supporting learning in practice (Pearcey and Elliott, 2004) and that ‘learning is maximised when the learner is effectively partnered with a clinician and experiences are shared’ (Henderson et al., 2009, p.178). In this context, The Programme Tutor (PT) – a role unique to the pre-registration nursing programme at The Open University (OU) – is crucial in facilitating learning in the practice setting. The purpose of the PT role is to work longitudinally with both students and their mentors to support learning in practice and monitor student progress. The PT therefore plays a pivotal role in facilitating learning in the practice setting, aspects of which may have potential for transfer to the wider health education sector.
Objectives
The overall aim of the project was to critically examine the experiences of a sample of PTs supporting students and mentors on the pre-registration nursing programme at the OU in order to identify the key features of effective PT practice. These features would then inform the continuing development of the programme. Two PTs were recruited as co-researchers on the project, the objectives of which were to:
• Explore PT’s experiences of supporting students and mentors
• Explore PT’s views regarding student progression
• Identify how PTs ‘grow’ into their role
• Identify enabling and disabling factors contributing to role effectiveness
• Examine the boundaries between the role of the PT and mentor
• Explore variations in the PT role across the UK.
Data collection and analysis
A sample of 20 PTs working on the final practice module of the pre-registration nursing programme, and located across the nations and regions of the UK, was identified. Following ethical approval, telephone interviews were conducted using an interview guide informed by both a review of the literature and the experience of the PT co-researchers. Telephone interviews were used in preference to individual face-to-face interviews in order to accommodate the dispersed geographical spread of participants. The interviews were recorded using digital recording equipment and following transcription, conventional approaches to qualitative data analysis were used to identify common themes across the data.
The ethical principles of confidentiality, anonymity and informed consent were upheld throughout the study. The sample was assured that confidentiality would be maintained at all times throughout the project. Anonymity was protected by using pseudonyms both for PTs and organisations. Informed consent was gained at the start of the project and participants were able to withdraw from the project at any stage.
Findings suggest that PTs find their role both rewarding and vital in the context of creating supportive learning environments and ultimately supporting students’ transition to become registered practitioners. Being an effective communicator and establishing and maintaining relationships with students, mentors and service managers was described as crucial to the success of the role. Understanding the pressures within practice environments and being able to acknowledge the realities of ‘working at the coalface’ enabled PTs to support both students and mentors in such settings.
Conclusion
This paper will elaborate more fully the findings of the project, illustrated with reference to verbatim quotes from the data. Although a role unique to the OU pre-registration nursing programme, there may be aspects of the role which could be transferable to other practice-based learning settings. This will be interactively debated with conference delegates.
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References
Fretwell, J. E. (1982) Ward teaching and Learning, Royal College of Nursing, London.
Henderson, A., Twentyman, M., Eaton, E., Creedy, D., Stapleton, P. and Lloyd, B. (2009) Creating supportive clinical learning environments: an intervention study, Journal of Clinical Nursing, 19, pp.171-182.
Ogier, M. E. (1981) An ideal sister, Royal College of Nursing, London
Orton, H. D. (1981) Ward learning climate, Royal College of Nursing, London
Pearcey, P. A. and Elliott, B. E. (2004) Student impressions of clinical nursing, Nurse Education Today, 18, pp.29-31
Designing a competency based program to facilitate the progression of experienced engineering technologists to professional engineer status
This paper describes the pedagogical principles that underpin the design of the Master of Engineering Practice, a distance education program offered by the University of Southern Queensland. This innovative program enables experienced engineering technologists to use their workplace learning to assemble portfolios that demonstrate their achievement of many of the competencies defined for a graduate of the program. Students are required to be self-directed learners and to use reflective practices to assess their own learning. Following a self-assessment process undertaken in the first course in the program, each student prepares a Pathway to Graduation Plan
which they then follow through to graduation. Graduates of the program are able to become registered as Chartered Professional Engineers
A study on text-score disagreement in online reviews
In this paper, we focus on online reviews and employ artificial intelligence
tools, taken from the cognitive computing field, to help understanding the
relationships between the textual part of the review and the assigned numerical
score. We move from the intuitions that 1) a set of textual reviews expressing
different sentiments may feature the same score (and vice-versa); and 2)
detecting and analyzing the mismatches between the review content and the
actual score may benefit both service providers and consumers, by highlighting
specific factors of satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) in texts.
To prove the intuitions, we adopt sentiment analysis techniques and we
concentrate on hotel reviews, to find polarity mismatches therein. In
particular, we first train a text classifier with a set of annotated hotel
reviews, taken from the Booking website. Then, we analyze a large dataset, with
around 160k hotel reviews collected from Tripadvisor, with the aim of detecting
a polarity mismatch, indicating if the textual content of the review is in
line, or not, with the associated score.
Using well established artificial intelligence techniques and analyzing in
depth the reviews featuring a mismatch between the text polarity and the score,
we find that -on a scale of five stars- those reviews ranked with middle scores
include a mixture of positive and negative aspects.
The approach proposed here, beside acting as a polarity detector, provides an
effective selection of reviews -on an initial very large dataset- that may
allow both consumers and providers to focus directly on the review subset
featuring a text/score disagreement, which conveniently convey to the user a
summary of positive and negative features of the review target.Comment: This is the accepted version of the paper. The final version will be
published in the Journal of Cognitive Computation, available at Springer via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12559-017-9496-
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