1007 - Lab Skills: Putting Cognitive Thought into Psychomotor Competence

Nursing skills are an important part of nursing education. Students focus on the motor portion when learning psychomotor skills and disregard the bigger picture of how the psychomotor skill fits with the patient care. New graduate nurses should begin to demonstrate competence during their first year of practice. This requires them to scrutinize patient care to ensure safe practice. To help with this development of new nurses, educators need to move beyond low level questioning and facilitate students’ learning that promotes knowledge connection to actual patient care. High level questioning using clinical judgment frameworks enables students to practice critical thinking and clinical judgment. One form of high-level questioning commonly used in nursing education is debriefing. According to the INACSL Standards, “The goal of the debriefing process is to assist in the development of insights, improve future performance, and promote the transfer and integration of learning to practice.” Socratic questioning has been used to help clarify understanding and determine reasons for actions. This presentation will describe the process we developed to teach and evaluate psychomotor skills at our college. Lab orientation, immersion, and skills practice time in lab include video and text review, and expectations for test out annotation. For the students’ nursing process lab test out, each student receives prebrief and is recorded assessing and performing skills on their simulated patient. After providing care, the student watches their recording and annotates a self-reflection to debrief their test out. They also annotate specific questions about their assessment, intervention, and evaluation thought processes for faculty review. Faculty then provide feedback on not only the performance of the skill, but also on those thought processes. Transitioning from the focus on the motor portion of evaluating psychomotor skills to including the thought processes can be facilitated by reflective thinking and high-level questioning.