There are positive benefits to near-peer teaching for both levels of students. According to McKenna and Williams (2017), students identified with the near-peer teachers, gained increased understanding of the course requirements, had decreased anxiety about clinical expectations, and learned how to manage difficult situations. Students also gained role models through their involvement with the near-peer teachers (Nelson et al., 2013). The near-peer teachers reported improvements in their teaching skills, knowledge, and clinical skills through this experience, while the lower-level students received helpful feedback on clinical skills in a supportive learning environment. (Khaw & Raw, 2016; deMenezes & Premnath, 2016).
There is a lack of research on collaboration between undergraduate and graduate nursing students, although some studies have been published on near-peer teaching in nursing education. In one study, second-year nursing students were utilized for the health assessment head-to-toe physical examinations by first-semester students, with positive feedback received for both groups of students (Bryant, 2017). In the simulation laboratory, senior level students have been used successfully as facilitators for junior level students (Dumas, Hollerbach, Stuart, & Duffy, 2015). Students also provided positive feedback about a simulation experience using higher-level nursing students as patients for first semester nursing students (Owen & Ward-Smith, 2014).
In our program, the online MSN graduate students in the Patient Education and Advocacy course currently create low-literacy pamphlets for community agencies. Typically, topics focus on chronic disease diagnosis and management, including lifestyle changes and other areas of importance for patient education. Leadership on the choice of topics in this project will be bottom-up drawn from the needs of the targeted populations. Our first-year residential undergraduate BSN students in the Population-Focused Nursing and Healthcare Policy course complete community assessments as part of their required learning activities. In a planned collaboration, the community assessments of the residential undergraduate BSN students will be utilized by the online graduate MSN students to create low-literacy pamphlets. These will meet the needs of the specific populations served by six community health care agencies, including free clinics, community health centers, and a public school district. Students working on this project will be geographically dispersed over five rural southeastern counties in underserved medical areas. These pamphlets will also be utilized during teaching sessions, staffed mainly by undergraduate nursing students, at the community agencies. Both before and after the project, demographic information and survey data will be obtained from both the undergraduate and graduate nursing students to assess their perceptions about intraprofessional collaborative educational activities. The planned survey instrument was adapted from Robben et al. (2012).
This project will help achieve the student learning outcome goals for two different nursing program levels. In addition, the use of the created pamphlets will help meet the educational needs of the community and support health equity in these underserved populations. A unique aspect of this research project is the intraprofessional collaborative nature of the learning activities across both program levels and educational settings.