Pedagogical Posters in Nurse Education: Developing Best Practise

Experiences from teaching nursing students at bachelor level with respect to prevention and health promotion have resulted in the introduction of poster presentations as a pedagogical tool. Poster presentations were introduced as a result of Bologna recommendations shifting the goal of nurse education away from focusing upon formal qualifications towards the concept of developing nurse competences. These recommendations have resulted in challenges to traditional pedagogical approaches away from the teacher’s role as the disseminator of knowledge towards the role of facilitator of learning. This is in tact with professional demands highlighting the necessity of life-long learning. Poster presentations have successfully been employed in developing students’ intellectual, professional and academic competences as well as being useful in developing competences with relevance to health promotion practice. Working with posters forces students to organize, evaluate and reflect upon information and develops their abilities to communicate health knowledge. Students have learned to present their ideas in an A4 poster format that resembles the types of posters one normally sees at professional conferences. The posters are produced on computers and as such the students learn to employ the computer as a creative tool. Students evaluate the use of posters as a concrete and useful tool of value to their forthcoming professional work as purveyors of health promotion knowledge.
The poster as a pedagogical tool was integrated in a Nordic network’s intensive course held in the autumn of 2008. The network received funding for a research project with the goal of making recommendations with respect to best practice curriculum guidelines in prevention and health promotion education for students of nursing in the Nordic countries. The intensive course served as starting point for the gathering of data concerning student evaluations of the Nordic curriculum in prevention and health promotion. Students’ reflections with respect to the development of their competences in this area were collected using a combination of group interviews and questionnaires. The students’ evaluations of poster based presentations were extremely positive.

Key words: Problem Based Learning, pedagogical posters, Bologna process, best practice guidelines