The Triple Threat: Statistics, Research, and Theory

Calls for reforming nursing education and the need to produce higher quality instruction without redundancies challenged this nurse educator to create a new research course for today’s graduate nursing students (Institute of Medicine, 2010). This newly constructed graduate research course is in stark contrast to traditional research courses as it bridges the gap that exists between classroom and clinical (Benner, Sutphen, Leonard, & Day, 2010). This innovative pedagogical method highlights specific evidence-based curriculum practices to enhance one’s teaching repertoire as well as to encourage student engagement and professionalism by implementing cooperative, teaching-learning strategies that promote a synergistic, learning environment for an online nursing research course.

Combining statistics, research, and theory into one course establishes their interrelatedness and reflects their connection to real world nursing practice. It is incumbent on today’s nurse educators to design innovative curriculum approaches which stimulate students’ interest to critique research that includes appropriate statistics along with the integration of guiding nursing theory. The skills of critiquing relevant literature, using research to promote evidence-based care, and deliver quality patient outcomes are essential for all nurses. Creating meaningful learning experiences by merging content that has traditionally been taught in silos minimizes anxiety surrounding the use and application of research and evidence-based practice. Students often share their reluctance to take any of these three courses separately: statistics, research, or theory. Students in an integrated research course that blends these three are better equipped and less reluctant to engage in nursing research. This is the first course of its kind to incorporate these three constructs into one collaborative course to enhance students’ interest and desire for future research.

Nurse educators must demonstrate and create opportunities for using and applying nursing research, statistics, and theory in order to advance the profession by preparing graduates who can deliver quality patient care. Nursing history includes research and is better positioned more than ever before to advance healthcare especially when equipped with a strong foundation of research, statistics, and theory. Dialogs with other nursing faculty have generated much interest in how to build a course that assimilates statistics, research, and theory without merely adding further content. Students’ assignments and discussions reflected understanding and analysis of the three constructs. Students’ comments in the end-of-course surveys included that they could not imagine learning these constructs independently.