Addressing obstacles to success: Increasing student engagement with science

Abstract

The overall aim of our research was to address the issue of science as a problem for students in undergraduate nursing and midwifery programmes at Wintec. Previously, students have reported science as being difficult and time-consuming, and their achievement results indicated that many students found science problematic. The literature which supports the research draws from both science and nursing education. It explores theory-to-practice and practice-to-theory links. highlighting the largely tacit nature of these links (Chin et al, 2004). We wanted to make the links between science and practice more explicit, in the hope that this would increase student understanding of and engagement with science. Phase Two has focused on implementing and evaluating three prioritised content areas. It is hoped that enhanced contextualisation of these areas will enable students to more effectively make meaningful theory/practice links and minimise content overload. Different teaching strategies were implemented including extensive content reduction for the intervention topics, the inclusion of narrative stories, and simplified teaching resources to make the theory/practice links more explicit. Our experience of this phase will be described in this presentation. Our preliminary analysis of the evaluation data collected to date suggests students have an increased engagement with science.