Influence of Collaborative Learning on Clinical Reasoning Skills of Pre-Licensure Nursing Students

In the field of nursing, student-centered learning has been proposed as an effective teaching strategy that could improve student engagement, assist with developing skills to compare and contrast information, analyze and interpret data and solve clinical practice problems, all of which are key in reasoning ability. Nurses must be able to demonstrate sound clinical reasoning skills to augment their educational preparation in providing safe, competent patient care. The purpose of the study was to determine if collaborative activities were effective in improving clinical reasoning skills. A convenience sample of 17 second-year nursing students from one community college who were enrolled in their second medical/surgical clinical rotation participated in the intervention.  Preliminary analyses compared the three groups of nursing students who were assigned to three medical/surgical clinical rotations. The groups’ overall scores and scores on the five domains for the OPT did not differ significant, providing support that clinical reasoning skills of the students in the three groups did not differ in prior to completing the first case study.  A t-test for dependent samples was used to determine if nursing students’ clinical reasoning skills changed significantly from the first week to the final week of the study. Students’ overall scores increased significantly. Although the posttest scores for the five domains were higher than the pretest scores, the differences were not statistically significant. Additional studies should be conducted using different teaching strategies to examine the effect that collaboration has on enhancing clinical reasoning.