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The nurse mentor is important in the personal and professional development of undergraduate nurses, ensuring that nursing students are competent and well prepared for practice at the point of registration. The importance of a rigorous evidence base for mentors and fellow nurse educators to use to inform education and practice should not be overlooked. This article seeks to expand this knowledge base and acquire research data that is relevant, topical and in line with the latest thinking to support best practice in nurse mentorship and nursing student education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The concepts of causation and prediction are different, and have different implications for practice. This distinction is applied here to studies of the problem of student attrition (although it is more widely applicable)., Background: Studies of attrition from nursing courses have tended to concentrate on causation, trying, largely unsuccessfully, to elicit what causes drop out. However, the problem may more fruitfully be cast in terms of predicting who is likely to drop out., Methods: One powerful method for attempting to make predictions is rule induction. This paper reports the use of the Answer Tree package from SPSS for that purpose., Data: The main data set consisted of 3978 records on 528 nursing students, split into a training set and a test set. The source was standard university student records., Results: The method obtained 84% sensitivity, 70% specificity, and 94% accuracy on previously unseen cases., Discussion: The method requires large amounts of high quality data. When such data are available, rule induction offers a way to reduce attrition. It would be desirable to compare its results with those of predictions made by tutors using more informal conventional methods.

Thirteen student nurses from the Mental Health and Learning Disability branches (Project 2000) of the School of Care Sciences at the University of Glamorgan volunteered to participate in a research study as research assistants. Participation of this kind represents a novel, practical way of learning about research. Following training and data collection within the research study we evaluated the student's experience of training and participation. Within the survey both quantitative and qualitative data were collected using a self-report questionnaire. Thirteen questionnaires were distributed and twelve completed questionnaires were returned to the School of Care Sciences. The overall results were extremely encouraging with regards to using this approach to increase research awareness. An evaluation of the student's experiences as a researcher confirmed that this was a successful strategy to learning, in particular increasing knowledge of the research process, ethical considerations and skills in interviewing. Involvement also increases the student's awareness of the topic area being studied. Limitations to the study were that this was a small sample.