Successful Application Exercises: Charting Data and Image Sorting for an Intra-Professional Group of Graduate Nursing Students.

Mary P. King, PhD, RN, CPNP-PC, Assistant Professor of Clinical Nursing The University of Texas at Austin Texas, School of Nursing Austin, Texas 

Background: Advanced Pediatric Health and Developmental Assessment was a first semester course required for graduate nursing students in pediatric and neonatal areas of concentration. Expansion of the graduate programs, greater student diversity, and lean faculty resources led to the introduction of Team Based Learning (TBL) as the overall teaching strategy. 

Purpose: To report two successful application exercises about  physical and developmental assessment for a group of 22 graduate nursing students whose professional nursing experience ranged from less than 1 to greater than 20 years. 

Methods:  Students were assigned to teams for the semester. Each team had students from the different areas of concentration. Charting Data:  Each team was provided data about a patient’s chief complaint; abbreviated past medical history; laboratory or radiograph results; past and present head circumference, height, and weight data; and a set of focused questions. Teams presented their patient’s results and of the implications of the growth parameters and subsequent history questions.  Image sorting: Given a set of cards with images of two six month old infants, each team sorted the images into normal and atypical physical development.  Teams reported the criteria for category assignment. Faculty facilitated group discussion of growth and development and history taking followed application exercises.

 Results:  Charting Data:  Students reported that the physical experience of charting the growth parameters led to a much deeper understanding of the significance of obtaining and recording accurate measurements, and challenges of interpretation and report of growth data in the context of a patient encounter. Image sorting: Students accurately sorted the infant images but had difficulty in describing the criteria for assignment to normal or atypical categories.

Conclusions: Overall feedback from students indicated that while these two application exercises were positive, many challenges remain in designing application activities to benefit this diverse group of graduate students.