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Students often struggle to apply their knowledge of bioscience to their care practice. Such knowledge is generally learned through remembering and understanding, but retention quickly fades. They also experience difficulty progressing to higher-order cognitive skills such as applying, analyzing, evaluating, and even creating, which are necessary to develop soft skills, such as critical thinking, in the care profession. In order to improve existing programs, there is a need to better understand students' prior learning experiences and processes. The proposed study will explore the previous learning experiences of nurses enrolled in a two-year nursing program at a Taiwan university and identify the challenges they face in integrating multidisciplinary knowledge and developing critical thinking competency. The study will adopt a constructivist grounded theory methodology to collect interview data. The findings are expected to improve higher cognitive learning performance and inform the revision of the two-year nursing curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to determine clinical instructors' perceptions of the assessments used to evaluate the clinical knowledge of undergraduate nursing students. This study uses a descriptive phenomenological approach. Purposive sampling was used to recruit sixteen clinical instructors for semi-structured interviews between August and December 2019. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analyzed using a modified Colaizzi's seven-step method. Four criteria were used to ensure the study's validity: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. Three themes were identified in the clinical instructors' views on evaluating the clinical performance of student nurses: familiarity with students, patchwork clinical learning, and differing perceptions of the same scoring system. The study results suggest a need for a reliable, valid, and consistent approach to evaluating students' clinical knowledge. If the use of patchwork clinical internships for student nurses is unavoidable, a method for assessing student nurses' clinical performance that requires instructor consensus is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complexity of healthcare and concurrent advances in technology have promoted Interprofessional Education (IPE) in healthcare schools to prepare students to collaborate on interdisciplinary teams. Since 2016, healthcare curricula in Taiwan have incorporated IPE-based capstone courses to enhance creativity. To better understand the predictors of team creativity could help educators improve IPE and outcomes for nursing students and patients. To determine whether nursing students' demographic characteristics, individual creativity, and perceived team interaction behaviors, team swift trust, team conflict, and team task interdependence may predict high perceived team creativity in IPE settings. A cross-sectional study design included nursing students (N = 99) at a science and technology university in Taiwan. Data from self-report questionnaires included variables for demographic characteristics, individual creativity, and perceived team characteristics. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis revealed predictors of high perceived team creativity. Nursing students who perceived high team creativity also perceived higher interaction behaviors and lower process conflict than those who perceived less creativity. Spontaneous communication and team task conflict predicted high perceived team creativity. Nursing educators could increase team creativity in IPE by encouraging spontaneous communication and constructive task-oriented conflict management. This may benefit patient outcomes in the future. • Nursing students in IPE programs in Taiwan perceived high team creativity. • Spontaneous communication and task conflict predicted high team creativity. • To foster spontaneous communication and manage conflict may boost team creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Nursing competency is a standard component of the nursing curriculum in baccalaureate nursing education in Taiwan. However, limited studies have been found on the development of a measurement for assessing Taiwanese baccalaureate-level nursing competency. Objective The aim of this study was to develop and validate a Nursing Students Competence Instrument (NSCI) for Taiwanese baccalaureate-level nursing students. Design The items of this newly developed scale were derived from a previous published qualitative study by the authors. Validity and reliability of the instruments were assessed with exploratory factor analysis. In considering external validity and homogenous characteristics, data were collected from two periods of time: February 2011 and 2012. Setting Four hundreds nursing students enrolled in the 2-year baccalaureate-level at the study university in Taiwan were invited to participate in the study. Participants Two hundreds and nine nursing students in the 2-year baccalaureate-level program were recruited. Methods Descriptive statistics and exploratory factor analysis were used to determine validity of the instrument. Cronbach alpha, split-half coefficients and item analysis verified the reliability of instrument. Results Significant levels of reliability and validity for the newly developed Nursing Student Competency Instrument were found. The competency instrument comprised four dimensions with 27 items for graduates to meet to determine their nursing competency. Four factors were analyzed and categorized as integrating care abilities, leading humanity concerns, advancing career talents, and dealing with tension, and explained 22.29%, 18.59%, 15.99% and 11.23% of total variance, respectively; these four explained 68.09% of the total variance. Conclusions Results support validation of the new nursing competence assessment scale for Taiwanese nursing students at baccalaureate levels. The authors recommend that the NSCI could be applied in the nursing schools to evaluate the learning outcomes of nursing students' competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives To further examine the psychometric properties of the spiritual health scale short form, including its reliability and validity. Background Spirituality is one of the main factors associated with good health outcomes. A reliable and valid instrument to measure spirituality is essential to identify the spiritual needs of an individual and to evaluate the effect of spiritual care. Design A cross-sectional study design was used. Methods The study was conducted in six nursing schools in northern, central and southern Taiwan. The inclusion criterion for participants was nursing students with clinical practice experience. Initially, 1141 participants were recruited for the study, but 67 were absent and 48 did not complete the questionnaires. A total of 1026 participants were finally recruited, indicating a response rate of 89·9%. The psychometric testing of the spiritual health scale short form included construct validity with confirmatory factor analysis, known-group validity and internal consistency reliability. Results The results of the confirmatory factor analysis supported the five-factor model as an acceptable model fit. In the known-group validity, the results indicated that people who are in the category of primary religious affiliation have better spiritual health than people in the category of secondary religious affiliation and atheism. The result also indicated that the 24-item spiritual health scale short form achieved an acceptable internal consistency coefficient. Conclusions The findings suggest that the spiritual health scale short form is a valid and reliable instrument for the appraisal of individual spiritual health. Relevance to clinical practice The spiritual health scale short form could provide useful information to guide clinical practice in assessing and managing people's spiritual health in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study aimed to determine the impact of an elective spiritual education course for nursing students on spiritual competencies. A convenience sample of nursing students (N = 92) was recruited from a baccalaureate school of nursing between February and July 2016. The intervention group (n = 45) was comprised of students enrolled in the elective spiritual education course which integrated non-Christian Eastern cultural beliefs; the control group was comprised of students not enrolled in the elective (n = 47). A quasi-experimental design examined pretest, posttest, and follow-up data from students' self-administered questionnaires. The intervention effect of the course was analyzed using generalized estimation equation. The results indicated posttest scores among nursing students in the intervention group were significantly better than the comparison group for spiritual health. Practicum stress and professional commitment were significantly better at follow-up. Spiritual care attitudes, caring behavior, and religious belief were significantly improved from pretest to posttest, and at follow-up for the intervention group compared with the control group. In conclusion, a spiritual education course should be considered as a regular course in the nursing curriculum, which could improve students' spiritual competencies, individual spiritual growth, and the ability to care for patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, empirical researchers have observed direct associations between conflict and interaction behaviors within organizational teams. However, research concerning indirect links between conflict and interaction behaviors on interdisciplinary teams in nursing school is scant, particularly in Taiwan. The aim of this study was to explore the relationships among various types of conflict and interaction behaviors on interdisciplinary nursing education teams. This study utilized a cross-sectional, quantitative, descriptive design. The authors collected survey data from 99 nursing students who participated in 18-week capstone courses of small interdisciplinary groups collaborating to design healthcare products in Taiwan during 2018 and 2019. Questionnaires assessed the nursing students' perceptions about their teams' conflicts (of task, process, and relationship), and interaction behaviors (constructive controversy, helping behaviors, and spontaneous communication). The authors used descriptive statistics to compare demographics, conflict scores, and interaction behavior scores for collocated and distributed interdisciplinary teams. A Pearson's analysis identified correlations among the variables and their components, and the SPSS PROCESS macro showed moderating effects of spontaneous communication on the relationship between distributed team and conflict subscales. After confirming the distributed team experienced significantly more conflict than the collocated team, we found significant negative correlations between constructive controversy and both process conflict and relationship conflict on the distributed team. Another interaction behavior, spontaneous communication, had a moderating effect on the relationships between the distributed team and both task conflict and relationship conflict. In interdisciplinary educational settings for nursing students, spontaneous communication may moderate the types of conflict that distributed teams are more likely than collocated teams to experience. Constructive controversy may be especially effective at mitigating conflict on distributed teams. Nursing educators may refer to these insights to improve outcomes for educational interdisciplinary healthcare teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]