Evaluation of nursing students about learning with clinical simulation.

OBJECTIVE to describe the contributions of clinical simulation for learning cognitive and procedural attributes through debriefing, from the perspective of nursing students. METHOD descriptive exploratory study. Twenty nursing undergraduate students from a university in the interior of the state of São Paulo participated in this study. Data collection was performed at the debriefing stage. Student's perceptions about the simulation, positive aspects and what they could have done differently were registered. The students' statements were grouped according to the central themes and the framework of Bardin's content analysis (2011) and were analyzed using descriptive statistics. RESULTS enhancement of active, critical and reflective learning (47.5%) was identified due to the closeness to reality in nursing care (20.3%), manifestation of feelings experienced during the simulation (15.3%) and composition of the scenario (15.3%). CONCLUSION the clinical simulation followed by debriefing promotes the understanding of the link between action and achievements in learning.