NURSING EXPERTISE AND COGNITIVE PROCESSING (SCHEMA, ENCODING).
Contributors: Arizona State University.
Published: 1985
Number of pages: 147
Subjects: Education, Educational Psychology.
Description: This study investigates how people with varying levels of expertise encode, organize, and recall nursing information presented in two types of text. Further, it examines the ability of these persons to recognize problems and propose solutions.

The design was a 2 text (logical vs. interleave) x 3 expertise (innocent, competent, proficient) with 108 subjects reading a 1,000-word narrative. The text contained a setting plus two primary episodes. Each episode contained an unresolved problem, and information either directly, indirectly, or not related to the problem. One problem was explicit and discussed, the other was embedded in the text but not discussed. The text presented the episodes in either an organized or a disrupted manner.

Subjects underlined information they considered to be important as they read the prose, wrote a restricted summary recall, an unrestricted free recall, and a problem statement and solution recall. Idea units determined a priori were used to score the number and type of idea units recalled. These idea units were rated for the kind of statement they represented.

No differences in either type or amount of information encoded was demonstrated by any group. Proficient nurses reading the interleave text produced superior recall for total idea units and problem idea units in both summary and free recall and the majority of these were paraphrased. All groups demonstrated superior performance to the innocent interleave group in ability to recognize the explicit problem and state a preferred problem solution. However, the two proficient nursing groups demonstrated superior ability to state the embedded problem correctly and of these two groups, only the proficient logical group demonstrated superior performance on proposing a preferred solution.

These results support an elaborated schema theory. Proficient nurses used this schema to hold larger quantities of information in short-term memory for condensation and organization resulting in larger chunks of paraphrased knowledge being transferred to long-term memory. Subjects with less prior knowledge used only a copy and delete strategy, processing was ineffective, and small amounts of verbatim information were transferred to long-term memory. The superiority of interleave subjects was seen as a result of distinctiveness of encoding difficult information.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-06, Section: A, page: 1559.

Thesis (PH.D.)--ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY, 1985.

School code: 0010.