Public health nursing is a challenging course to teach. Most baccalaureate nursing (BSN) students enter nursing school with a vision of acute care nursing practice. In contrast, they often have little previous exposure to the nurse’s role in public health. When adult learners do not readily understand why content is important to their future career, it can be difficult to engage them in the lea...

Attrition is a major concern in schools of nursing, and research shows that it is most prevalent in baccalaureate nursing students as they first encounter their initial nursing and core science courses. Nurse educators anticipate that beginning nursing students have the potential to be self-directed learners; and have the initiative to independently identify and implement resources and strategi...

Notions of the 'postmodern' pervade various fields of study, but have rarely been applied to the practice and theory of nursing. This paper uses some conceptions of the 'postmodern' to remedy this. Though there are many contested usages of the term, here 'postmodern' will be used broadly in a periodical sense to trace changes in society and culture from the 'modernism' of the 18th and 19th cent...

The grounded theory approach has been used in nursing research since 1970. Despite the extensive use of grounded theory over the past 40 years and the publication of papers and methodological textbooks, many novice researchers faced difficulties in applying grounded theory approach in their studies. The purpose of this paper is to discuss what is grounded theory, how it came about, and how it i...

The purpose of this systematic analysis of nursing simulation literature between 2000 -2007 was to determine how learning theory was used to design and assess learning that occurs in simulations. Out of the 120 articles in which designing nursing simulations was reported, 16 referenced learning or developmental theory as the basis of how and why they set up the simulation. Of the 16 articles th...

Nurse Healer OBJECTIVES Theoretical I Explore the Theory of Integral Nursing and its application to holistic nursing. I Link Florence Nightingale's legacy of healing , leadership, global action, and her work as a nurse and citizen activist to 21st-century integral and holistic nursing.

The purpose of this column is to stimulate discussion among nurses regarding the importance of nursing theory-guided practice. The use of metaphor may shed light on defining nursing by its own terms. The time has come for nursing to recognize its worth as an autonomous discipline and own its contributions.

The healthcare facility described in the following article is part of an eight-hospital organization that adopted Watson's Theory of Caring as part of their nursing philosophy. According to Watson, this theory is an attempt to find and deepen the language specific to nurse caring relations and its many meanings. Yet during the implementation of the theory within the setting described, it was no...