The mission was accepted, the course was redeveloped and has been offered and evaluated over an ensuing two year period.   The overall goal of the transformed course was to provide students with the skills and opportunities to become evidence utilizers. The major thrust of the course was threefold. Students were first challenged to refine their abilities to search the literature, explore the available array of published health care research resources, and build a basic vocabulary of research terminology.   Students then labored to develop skills to enable them to critically read and analyze research articles featuring a variety of quantitative and qualitative research designs.   Finally, students worked to identify and translate problems encountered in clinical practice into searchable and answerable questions.  Implementation protocols were then crafted from critically appraised research/evidence to resolve the identified clinical problems.  

Students used a variety of interactive and individualized approaches to tackle the tasks at hand.   Initial anxieties and frustrations at embarking upon unfamiliar and scary terrain gave way to growing excitement as students identified and discussed actual clinical problems from their own nursing practices and set about the process of finding the best solutions. The value of being able to critically read and analyze the available literature became readily apparent as they searched for support of their proposed interventions to those identified clinical problems.  Research became alive and relevant as students experienced first hand how to use that research to provide and support effective solutions to clinical problems. This presentation provides a snapshot of the process of transformation.