Increasing Student Engagement in Scholarly Inquiry in Nursing

Purposes/Aims: To describe methods used to actively engage undergraduate students in learning scholarly inquiry content.     

Rationale/Background: Students enrolled in an undergraduate EBP/scholarly inquiry course are inundated with new language/complex concepts. Although textbooks provide ideas for presenting content, additional creative/innovative methods for actively engaging students in the learning process are needed.  Active learning (AL) and collaborative learning (CL) are two methods. AL involves engaging students in learning by allowing them to participate in meaningful activities and think about what they are doing. CL refers to instructional methods where students work together in small groups toward a common goal. Both methods lead to better attitudes about learning/content, improved thinking and retention, and a desire to learn more.  

Description: AL activities involve creating questions about the day’s content and then asking individual students to answer a question by drawing a student’s name out of a hat, taping questions to the bottom of chairs where students sit that they must answer, or taping questions to healthy treats and then inviting each student take a treat and answer the question taped to that treat. CL activities include dividing students into groups of three to five students/group, asking each group to examine a different recent nursing research article for particular information, and then share that information with the class. For example, when learning about qualitative designs, each group is provided with a recent article describing a different qualitative design and then asked to determine the type of design and data gathered/analyzed, decide whether or not saturation was reached, and discuss how investigators determined rigor. Another CL activity involves having student groups create illustrations depicting research questions and then explain the illustrations to the class.

Outcomes Achieved/Conclusions: Students were enthusiastic about AL/CL activities; they enriched learning, provided opportunities for reticent students to present content, and enhanced engagement.