Title: Analysing Nursing Students' Drug Calculation Errors
Abstract: Nursing students at universities are often tested on drug calculations through their degree. These are usually pencil and paper tests which may provide an imperfect picture of drug error. A project, based at the University of Southern Queensland’s academic support unit, was developed to investigate the cognitive and metacognitive processes used by students who have difficulty with drug calculations. This paper presents some of the findings of this research, based on group interviews of nursing students. It identifies student strategies, error and reasons for error. The results of this research will provide a framework for future support for nursing students. Universities often provide support to nursing students to improve their numeracy skills and more specifically to assist students undertake medical calculations confidently and correctly. In order to provide the correct support, lecturers need to know where students’ errors are occurring, understand why errors occur, and provide appropriate support to reduce future error. Traditionally, support programs have provided testing. This, in combination with faculty input from students’ results in various drug calculation tests, has provided comprehensive data on where student error occurs in pencil and paper tests. Many of these tests have been used as a basis for providing support for students. However, one-to-one support has provided anecdotal evidence and recent research have provided further evidence to suggest broader reasons why students make errors as well as a different picture on the errors themselves. Support programs in many universities, are providing programs such as workshops, and one-to-one support and are now based on general constructivist and situated abstraction theories (Stillman, Alison, Croker, & Tonkin 1999; Hoyles, 1998). These programs may provide the right environment for student learning, but what should they learn? If various programs rely on information from student error based on pencil and paper tests, then the picture is incomplete. A project, based at the University of Southern Queensland was developed to investigate the cognitive and metacognitive processes used by students who have difficulty with drug calculations. More specifically the project aimed to use group and one-to-one interviews to identify student strategies, error and reasons for error and provide a framework for support based on past practice at USQ, current practice at other institutions and information from interviews. This paper will examine a section of this project which identifies the errors and the reasons for error made by the students in the group interviews. It will also provide suggested directions for support programs such as nursing.
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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