Gett'n on the bus: evaluation of Sentinel City®3.0 virtual simulation in community/population health clinical placement.

Objectives The purpose of this project was to implement and evaluate the integration of a computer-based virtual simulation program into a community clinical course as an alternative or complement to conventional clinical with agencies or neighbourhoods. Securing quality community health clinical opportunities for undergraduate nursing students remains challenging. In addition, evidence of a theory-practice gap in community clinical education, particularly in non-traditional settings, suggests that nurse educators need to adopt different pedagogies to ensure that students will gain competencies necessary to practice community/population health nursing.

A, B, or C? A Quasi-experimental Multi-site Study Investigating Three Option Multiple Choice Questions.

There is nearly a century of educational research that has demonstrated that three option multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are as valid and reliable as four or five option, yet this format continues to be underutilized in educational institutions. This replication study was a quasi-experimental between groups research design conducted at three Canadian schools of nursing to examine the psychometric properties of three option MCQs when compared to the more traditional four option questions. Data analysis revealed that there were no statistically significant differences in the item discrimination, difficulty or mean examination scores when MCQs were administered with three versus four option answer choices.

Virtual versus face-to-face clinical simulation in relation to student knowledge, anxiety, and self-confidence in maternal-newborn nursing: A randomized controlled trial.

Background: Clinical simulations can provide students with realistic clinical learning environments to increase their knowledge, self-confidence, and decrease their anxiety prior to entering clinical practice settings.

Objective: To compare the effectiveness of two maternal newborn clinical simulation scenarios; virtual clinical simulation and face-to-face high fidelity manikin simulation.

Design: Randomized pretest-posttest design.

Protective associations of school connectedness with risk of depression in Nova Scotia adolescents.

Objective: To determine whether school connectedness demonstrated an independent protective association with risk of depression in students in grades 10 to 12 attending a high school in a rural community in southwestern Nova Scotia.

Methods: Students at a high school in rural Nova Scotia participated in a self-completion survey in May 2009. Students were asked about a wide range of health-related factors to determine their needs for health services and promotion.

High time for a change: psychometric analysis of multiple-choice questions in nursing.

Nurse educators teach students to develop an informed nursing practice but can educators claim the same grounding in the available evidence when formulating multiple-choice assessment tools to evaluate student learning? Multiple-choice questions are a popular assessment format within nursing education. While widely accepted as a credible format to assess student knowledge across disciplines, debate exists among educators regarding the number of options necessary to adequately test cognitive reasoning and optimal discrimination between student abilities. The purpose of this quasi-experimental between groups study was to examine the psychometric properties of three option multiple-choice questions when compared to the more traditional four option questions.

Nursing graduates' perceptions of their undergraduate clinical placement.

Student clinical practice is a significant and essential part of nursing education. Accordingly, clinical placements need to be positive and valuable. The purpose of this study was to describe newly-graduated nurses' perceptions of their student clinical intersession placements and how these placements impacted their functioning as graduate nurses.