Effect of guided reciprocal peer questioning strategy on pediatric nursing students' self-esteem and metacognitive awareness: Current approach and future directions.

Background: Guided Reciprocal Peer Questioning Strategy (GRPQS) restructures the classroom context from a passive into an engaging environment, where the students are empowered to actively participating in their learning process.

Objective: To investigate the impact of GRPQS on the pediatric nursing students' self-esteem and metacognitive awareness.

Design: A Quasi-experimental, pre-posttest, two groups research was carried out at University of Bahrain. A sample of 89 out of 112 pediatric nursing-students were divided into two groups.

Method: Through GRPQS, the students mutually generated and responded to questions, activated their critical thinking, elicited ideas, and shared learning experiences within the team and the teachers act as facilitators.

Results: It is revealed that 75% of the students in the study group developed high self-esteem after their engagement in the GRPQS compared to only 48.8% among those in the control one. Students who practiced GRPQS showed an improvement in their knowledge about cognition. As the mean score of students in the study group is increased from 2.16 ± 0.45 to 2.89 + 0.35 for the procedural knowledge, from 2.33 ± 0.56 to 2.86 ± 0.41 for declarative and from 2.18 + 0.53 to 3.09 ± 0.29 for the conditional knowledge (p < 0.001 for each). Concerning the regulation of cognition, the mean score of the planning dimension was improved from2.21 ± 0.46 to 3.10 ± 0.31 among the students in the study group. Moreover, it is clear that applying GRPQS in the lectures helped in improving the students' information management strategies, comprehension monitoring, debugging strategies and evaluation (p < 0.001 for each) compared to the control group p = 0.169, p = 0.009, p = 0.117 and 0.887 respectively).

Conclusion: The application of GRPQS provided an interactive and engaging learning experience that helped the students to develop the habit of organizing, judging, and summarizing information as well as focusing on the significant portions of the learning materials. Moreover, exchanging questions between the nursing students was effective in enhancing their self-esteem and metacognitive awareness. Hence, incorporating this innovative pedogeological approach in the nursing curricula is recommended.