Virtual Clinical to Help With High Stakes Testing

Purpose: Technology is in every aspect of students’ lives today, this is no different in nursing education.  Nursing education must find ways to capture nursing students’ interest and provide interactive learning opportunities.  When educators use virtual clinical experiences students are able to put theory content into real clinical patient scenarios.  This in turn provides students with a view of the whole patient rather than certain aspects of care being in isolation.  These virtual programs can be used in the classroom, nursing resource center, or as an assignment.  This quantitative research project used a retrospective design, and reviewed students Maternal/Child Specialty Health Education Systems Incorporated (HESI) scores.  One group of students used virtual clinical assignments and the other group did not use virtual assignments.  The scores of both groups were analyzed using SPSS.  Background: Nurse Educators must prepare nursing students to enter the profession with clinical competence to ensure patient safety. Baccalaureate nursing students used virtual clinical excursions as an educational learning activity.   Virtual clinical excursions were used in the Maternal/Child nursing courses and students were given assignments that corresponded with theory course content; the other class of students did not use the virtual environment.  Method: Students in the sample population were nursing students in a Bachelor of Science nursing program in the northeastern United States. Two distinct groups were used and Maternal/Child HESI scores were analyzed to see if there was a difference in scores after using a virtual clinical experience. The mean numeric HESI scores were placed in SPSS and then an independent t-test was conducted for statistical significance.  Findings: The group of students who used the virtual clinical program had HESI scores that were 100 points higher than the group who did not use this pedagogy.  Therefore this was statistically significant.  Conclusions: The recommendation is for nursing faculty to consider using virtual experiences to improve student outcomes on high stake exams. This could help students’ clinical reasoning skills in the practice setting, which would have an impact on patient outcomes.