EDUCATOR PERCEPTION AND USE OF PATTERN RECOGNITION PROCEDURES IN BACCALAUREATE NURSING PROGRAMS (INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES).
Contributors: Pennsylvania State University.
Published: 1991
Number of pages: 234
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Education, Higher.; Education, Educational Psychology.
Description: The purpose of this study was to identify and describe nursing higher education policy recommendations relative to an area in cognitive psychology called pattern recognition procedures and their influence on one desirable nursing education outcome. The desirable educational outcome was the ability of nurses to recognize and classify an emerging or changing health status pattern which threatened a patient's well-being. An investigation of educator awareness and practice in teaching pattern recognition in nursing provided preliminary research toward outcome assessment.

The recommendations stem from an investigation of baccalaureate nursing educators' perceptions of pattern recognition procedures as underlying principles for instructional strategies and their reported use of strategies based on these principles. A self-administered questionnaire was completed by 255 baccalaureate educators teaching in university- or college-based programs of the three major Carnegie classification types in the four major regions of the United States.

Descriptive statistical analysis revealed that the majority of educators perceived the principles of feature frequency, number, probability, and context to underlie instructional strategy use in depicting diagnostic patterns to nursing students. The majority did not perceive priming as a teacher-initiated activity. The majority of educators reported using advance organizers, environment-based techniques, algorithms and heuristics, questioning techniques, and planned discourse at different levels of skill acquisition. The majority of educators did not report using paradigm cases, printed materials, stating probability estimates, and simulations on a greater than sometimes basis to depict diagnostic patterns.

Two demographic attributes repeatedly demonstrated influence on the perception of principles and use scores: holding a doctorate versus a master's degree and having taken a graduate level course in teaching and learning principles.

Programs may benefit from employing a similar methodology to identify desirable outcomes and pursue a greater understanding of the necessary input to achieve that outcome. Nursing faculty may benefit from increased awareness of the principles of priming as teacher-initiated activities and to the potential benefit of supplying learners with probability estimates about features in a pattern. Nursing curricula may benefit from introducing strategies earlier in the program to maximize benefits of facilitating pattern recognition procedures.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-04, Section: B, page: 1962.

Thesis (PH.D.)--THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 1991.

School code: 0176.