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Institution: Georgian Court University, Lakewood, New Jersey
Contact Information: tb1294@nova.edu
Title: Teaching Test Taking Strategies- An Option or Ethical Requirement for Undergraduate Nursing Students?
Purpose: In undergraduate nursing students, how does learning test-taking strategies affect the emotions and thoughts during the preparation and exams, and how they perceive tests?
Design: The qualitative design implemented was an intrinsic exploratory multiple case study.
Methodology: Purposeful sampling was utilized to identify student nurses who had graduated a Baccalaureate nursing program but had yet to successfully pass the NCLEX exam, after more than a single attempt. A semi-structured interview was held, audio-recorded, and transcribed. Systematic coding and analysis of the yielded data was then completed.
Major Findings: Before learning test-taking strategies, the students expressed they perceived tests to be designed to ensure students chose the “wrong answer”. They attributes this to the nursing programs not teaching test-taking strategies but providing test plans or study guides instead. They explains the emphasis was on content and subjects. As a result, the themes emerged of confusion, inability to focus, and test anxiety during nursing exams prior to learning test-taking strategies. As a result of test taking strategies, the students voiced they are better able to identify their strengths and weakness in nursing theory. They also expressed increased confidence, renewed determination, and decreased anxiety during preparation for and during test-taking. After learning test-taking strategies, they explains perceiving tests as measuring their competency as a registered nurse instead of ensuring she choose incorrect items. They conclude that test taking strategies should be taught “from the door” of a baccalaureate nursing program to ensure student test taking success.
Conclusion: These students describe their abilities without test-taking strategies as being set up to fail as the faculty focused more on “subjects” and “content”. Nurse faculty have an ethical responsibility to the public and their pupils, in the wake of nursing shortage, to ensure that students are taught test-taking strategies so they can successfully take formative tests throughout their nursing edification and , cumulatively, by ensuring students have the ability to pass the NCLEX-RN. By upholding this responsibility the ethical principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice and the ethical theories of deontology, utilitarianism, casuist, rights, and virtue are fulfilled by nursing academia.