Encouraging students to learn non-core subjects in health education

This paper presents an intervention in nursing education designed to enhance nursing students’ motivation to participate and acquire transferable knowledge within nursing education. A specific part of the curriculum entitled; Organization, administration and management, is of low immediate interest of the students. The students generally regard this topic as irrelevant for their professional development as nurses. In order to motivate the students a range of different IT based pedagogical designs were implemented with the intent of scaffolding the students’ learning. The study, that this intervention is part of, was designed as a 2-year action research project. A variety of data-sources were utilized to document the process, including students’ and teachers’ experiences as expressed in interviews, observations of teaching and learning related behavior and data logging. This paper focuses on how integrating an IT based design affects the students’ learning processes. The research question was; how can students utilize the opportunities for learning in pedagogical designs that include; IT, video-clips, simulations, role playing and collaborative activities? To explore this we used a didactic model developed by University Colleges in Denmark: the study activity model. One of the main objectives for the study activity model is to look beyond traditional didactics and strengthen the awareness of the study activities that the students carry out themselves. The learning opportunities provided by the pedagogical design in this intervention seemed to engage a smaller group of students while a large group of students were frustrated. Our analysis suggests that the students viewed the flexible learning environment and the IT based designs as optional rather than sequential stepping stones towards the learning objectives. The aim of our pedagogical design was to include all students in reflective learning. In order to work with the content on a taxonomically appropriate level a substantial group of students needed more scaffolding and feedback. To respond to the heterogeneity of the student population in nursing education teacher presence and guidance is crucial. Our results suggest that the pedagogical design should support students at different levels to allow them to work and learn in such a way that the learning content can be put to use in a practice environment. The study also suggests that it takes more than one pass of a new pedagogical design to fully understand how to learn in a changed teaching environment.