Today's challenge, tomorrow's excellence: the practice of evidence-based education.

Nurse educators are being challenged to maintain quality in light of increasing numbers of students, declining numbers of experienced faculty, societal mandates, and rapid changes in health care. The scholarship underlying the practice of nursing education, or evidence-based education, must continue to be explored through the design, testing, and refinement of education strategies from nursing and other disciplines. The involvement of every educator in this process will help create institutional valuing that serves to retain inquisitive and reflective educators in academic settings, while expanding evidence-based education in nursing.

Design and testing of classroom and clinical teaching evaluation tools for nursing education.

Student evaluations of teaching provide administrators an overall picture of the effectiveness of personnel and contribute data for promotion and merit decisions. These evaluations must be assessed for their relevance, validity, and reliability. This paper describes the development process and psychometric testing for clinical (n = 149) and didactic (n = 148) student evaluation of teaching forms for undergraduate and graduate courses in one college of nursing.

Nursing: profession in peril.

The number of nursing faculty experienced and skilled in research and scholarship is declining because of retirement and insufficient numbers of new scholars entering academia. This trend, alone, puts the future development of the nursing profession at risk. In addition, the increasing expectations placed upon the existing professoriate in the teaching and essential institutional service arenas necessitated by this shortage limit both the time and energy of senior faculty who are most qualified to advance the profession.

Mentoring for research skill development.

The nursing shortage is significantly affecting the nursing academic environment. A self-perpetuating cycle of insufficient numbers of faculty with inadequate preparation for academia could lead to a profound decline in the nursing profession. Institutions often implement mentoring plans for new tenure track faculty, and the challenge is even greater in environments that are not research intensive.