Publications by authors named "Cathleen A Evans"

Nurse educators design simulations with the intent that students transfer previous academic learning. Transfer of learning (TOL) is a complex and abstract concept with critical literature gaps needing measurement research. This study examined the association between simulation characteristics and students' TOL attitudes and the effect strength.

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Objective: "Determine which clients to recommend for discharge in a disaster situation" is a Registered Nurse Activity Statement on the National Council Licensing Exam test plan. The activity statement raised the nursing education research question: could senior student nurses transfer their learning to a novel circumstance, with a high degree of risk, making decisions using patient assessments and determining resource needs? A study with a descriptive quantitative approach was designed with 2 aims. The first was to describe students' transfer of learning for basic disaster and medical-surgical knowledge and make recommendations for patient dispositions.

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A long-standing gap exists between graduate and newly licensed nurse abilities and employer expectations. The National League of Nursing has charged nurse educators to address health and welfare through innovative learning to improve student decision-making for patient care. How, then, can a nurse educator link education to practice, innovate learning, and improve student decision-making for patient care? One option is to use tabletop exercises in the nursing classroom.

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Background: Disasters require nurses to make decisions. A tabletop exercise, used in disaster education, is a classroom activity for solving problems.

Purpose: The study purposes were to (1) describe, as scores, the transfer of learning from basic medical-surgical coursework to student decisions made during a disaster scenario tabletop exercise and (2) identify students' attitudes about their use of their previous learning during this experience.

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Transferring previous learning to novel and unfamiliar health care situations is a challenge that nurses face daily. As a nursing classroom experience, tabletop exercises provide nursing students with open-ended decision-making opportunities to manage realistic practice problems. This article describes an innovative tabletop exercise with a disaster healthcare context and patient scenarios that senior nursing students used to demonstrate foundational nursing education knowledge, skills, and abilities.

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Background: Disasters are high-impact events. Tabletop exercises are a historic education strategy used to determine policies, procedures, and strengths and challenges for those involved. A tabletop exercise was designed for students to demonstrate transfer of prior medical-surgical content to a novel context of a hospital patient surge following a disaster.

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Disaster education is important for everyone and especially nurses. Being informed, making individual and family communication plans, and creating the needed supplies to shelter in place or evacuate for one's self and family are required core readiness behaviors. Nurses also need to understand their role within the employer's emergency plans and incident command structure.

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