Authors

  1. Serembus, Joanne Farley EdD, RN, CNE

Article Content

When teaching nursing research, faculty often rely on textbooks along with lectures, either face-to-face or video, and weekly exercises. Students taught in this manner often have a difficult time understanding research concepts, yet they need to understand how these concepts relate to their professional practice. Instituting context-based learning can help students learn and apply knowledge. Context-based learning is the use of real-life, authentic examples while teaching so students learn through actual, practical experience with subject matter rather than theory. Research Moment videos were created to help bring those concepts to life. Each brief video (5-10 minutes) focuses on the concepts introduced that week by using a published research article. Faculty point to concepts such as the research question, hypothesis, and dependent and independent variables as they are explained. Some of the same important research concepts are repeated with different articles as students move from week to week. Other videos emphasize sampling methods, research designs, and statistics. One of the key concepts, levels of measurement, is threaded through several weeks and finally associated with the appropriate statistics to be used. By using context-based teaching, significance and meaning are given to the concepts taught. Students comment that the weekly videos help them understand the components of research studies.