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Aim: To explore nursing students' academic emotions during ongoing learning activities focusing on perceived challenge and competence. Background: Emotions plays an important part in learning. Positive emotions can be beneficial while negative emotions can be detrimental to educational outcomes. Optimal experiences are situations when learners simultaneously experience sufficient challenge and competence. Since various learning activities are performed in different learning environments during the nursing program, it is of interest to investigate students' ongoing emotions in the occurring contexts. Design: A longitudinal descriptive study. Methods: By using the Contextual Activity Sampling System, data was collected every third week on a three-year nursing program. From August 2015 to January 2020, a total of 2, 947 questionnaires were answered by 158 students. Experiences of positive and negative academic emotions were calculated for the entire program. Optimal experience was calculated for courses where high discrepancy between positive and negative experiences were identified. Results: Students self-reported academic emotions varied over time and in relation to learning activities. High ratings of negative emotions were reported during clinical practice in all semesters except the final. Students' positive academic emotions and optimal experience in clinical practice increased after having deepened their academic knowledge. Conclusion: Nursing students had an increased positive experience when they themselves practice a learning activity and it appeared that they benefit from academic preparation prior to entering internship. Nursing students need an academic competence to develop their skills during training in the clinical reality. Increased collaboration between academia and clinic would be beneficial for students' clinical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The study describes issues that facilitate collaboration in teams of learners in an interprofessional education unit in intensive care. Methods: A descriptive qualitative study design was applied using semi-structured interviews based on the critical incident technique and qualitative content analysis. Nineteen participants, eight learners in their specialist training, nine supervisors and two head supervisors in Sweden identified 47 incidents. Result: Teams of learners having control was the core issue. Motivation, time, experiences and reflection were central issues for facilitating collaboration. Conclusion: Efficiently training teams how to collaborate requires learners having control while acting on their common understanding and supervisors taking a facilitating role supporting teams to take control of their critical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Clinical practice is essential for health care students. The supervisor's role and how supervision should be organized are challenging issues for educators and clinicians. Clinical education wards have been established to meet these challenges and they are units with a pedagogical framework facilitating students' training in real clinical settings. Supervisors support students to link together theoretical and practical knowledge and skills. From students' perspectives, clinical education wards have shown potential to enhance students' learning. Thus there is a need for deeper understanding of supervisors' pedagogical role in this context. We explored supervisors' approaches to students' learning at a clinical education ward where students are encouraged to independently take care of patients. Method: An ethnographic approach was used to study encounters between patients, students and supervisors. The setting was a clinical education ward for nursing students at a university hospital. Ten observations with ten patients, 11 students and five supervisors were included in the study. After each observation, individual follow-up interviews with all participants and a group interview with supervisors were conducted. Data were analysed using an ethnographic approach. Results: Supervisors' pedagogical role has to do with balancing patient care and student learning. The students were given independence, which created pedagogical challenges for the supervisors. They handled these challenges by collaborating as a supervisory team and taking different acts of supervision such as allowing students their independence, being there for students and by applying patient-centredness. Conclusion: The supervisors' pedagogical role was perceived as to facilitate students' learning as a team. Supervisors were both patient- and student-centred by making a nursing care plan for the patients and a learning plan for the students. The plans were guided by clinical and pedagogical guidelines, individually adjusted and followed up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to investigate newly admitted nursing students' views on nursing education and their future profession. Students' choice of education can be influenced by societal and familial values and among nursing students' altruistic motives are common. Students', conceptions, expectations and doubts combined with their orientations to learning affect their ability to successfully cope with studies in higher education. A descriptive design using mixed method. This mixed-method study is based on 126 qualitative semi-structured interviews and 158 questionnaires with newly admitted nursing students. The data collection was conducted during their first six weeks of education. Collected data were analyzed using content analysis and descriptive statistics. This study was conducted and reported in accordance with the COREQ checklist. The overarching theme: "Making a difference if managing to become a professional nurse", describing students' dichotomous emotions of expectations and doubts in relation to their conceptions, emerged from seven main categories. Students' ratings of emotions revealed high ambition and motivation. Fears and worries about uncertainty expressed in interviews correlated with ratings of negative emotions. Newly admitted nursing students think highly of the nursing profession and upcoming education. Students put faith in their own ability which is accompanied by doubts derived from uncertainty about forthcoming demands in academic, clinical and personal settings. Understanding of students' conceptions, expectations, doubts and their orientations to learning could be helpful in guiding them to acquire the nurse competencies necessary to become professional nurses that are able to handle complex situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on student learning in higher education suggests that threshold concepts within various disciplines have the capacity to transform students’ understanding. The present study explores students’ understanding in relation to particular threshold concepts in mathematics—integral and limit—and tries to clarify in what sense developing an understanding of those threshold concepts involves a transformation of understanding in relation to ways of thinking in mathematics. Drawing on data collected in interviews with students taking a basic course on calculus the analysis offers an initial characterisation of students’ understandings as algorithmic. It then proceeds to construct a more fine-grained theoretical account for how these understandings develop in the course of the interview, suggesting that the transformative aspects of threshold concepts may be conceptualised in terms of shifts in students’ contextualisations allowing the development of conceptions at different levels of abstraction simultaneously interacting to shape students’ awareness of the ways of thinking and practising in the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]