First Advisor

Aldridge, Michael

First Committee Member

Parker, Carlo

Second Committee Member

Pool, Natalie

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Document Type

Dissertation

Date Created

8-2024

Department

College of Natural and Health Sciences, Nursing, Nursing Student Work

Abstract

Nurses are responsible for providing safe patient care. When nurses lack skill competence, patient harm can occur. Therefore, providing skill competency education in pre-licensure nursing programs is key to providing safe patient care. Deliberate practice (DP) has been shown to be an effective teaching strategy for psychomotor skills acquisition and retention. Deliberate practice is the repetitive focused practice of skills facilitated by expert feedback with the goal to obtain mastery. The purpose of this descriptive, cross-sectional, quantitative study was to determine the proportion of undergraduate nurse educators who knew or did not know about DP, what undergraduate nurse educators who taught psychomotor skills knew about DP, how their understanding of DP aligned with the theory of DP, how they used DP in skills education, and their perceived barriers and facilitators to DP. One hundred sixty-one (161) nurse educators in the United States completed an online survey that solicited information about the participants’ knowledge about DP, their use of DP, and their perceived barriers and facilitators to using DP. Results showed that a small proportion of the participants had knowledge about DP and their conceptualization and application of DP did not align with Ericsson’s theory of DP (Ericsson et al., 1993). A small portion of participants used DP according to Ericsson’s theory, which might have been a result of limited access to resources. Participants identified limited resources such as enough time and enough faculty as barriers to using DP; they also identified time and faculty as facilitators to DP. Overall, this study showed that DP was not a well-known concept to nurse educators. Furthermore, nurse educators’ knowledge and use of DP were limited and misaligned with Ericsson’s theory of DP (Ericsson et al., 1993). These results could be due to the limited research in nursing education literature about DP, the lack of resources in nursing programs to implement DP in skills courses, or limited training or mentorship opportunities to teach nurse educators about DP. Implications for nursing education were discussed.

Abstract Format

html

Extent

129 pages

Local Identifiers

Tappendorf_unco_0161D_11243.pdf

Rights Statement

Copyright is held by the author.

Share

COinS