The Purpose of the Text & Overview
The Purpose of the Text
The following textbook is designed with the beginning prelicensure nursing student in mind. The book is designed around a central semester-long evidence-based practice project in which students will be producing an evidence-based practice (EBP) poster. The poster is a culmination of a semester-long project to include an EBP poster in which student groups are answering their developed clinical question by presenting evidence found in literature to help inform and improve clinical outcomes.
The OER textbook was designed to take place of an expensive, overly wordy textbook that often overwhelms the beginning nursing student. The content is meant to be an introduction with the expectation that instructors will design active learning assignments, lecture material, and supplemental learning activities to supplement the content. In this way, the reading assignments are less daunting and much more manageable, and instructors can utilize more time in class for group activities and other learning modalities, including critical appraisals of portions of articles during each classroom session to help proceed through the critical appraisal questions outlined in the Appendices.
How to use the Text in an EBP Course
The text is designed as a scaffolded approach to the overall EBP Project. The text is designed in a “Ask, Access, Appraise, Apply, and Assess” format, with just the first three steps being utilized in the EBP Project. The latter two steps will be discussed but not implemented in the overall project.
Each step of the EBP Project has appropriate assignments, documents, narrated tutorials, embedded interactive quizzes, and summaries within the textbook.
Project Includes:
Throughout the semester, the course will cover general guidelines that parallel the portions of the EBP project to include:
- Selecting a group.
- Completing a group contract.
- Choosing a clinical nursing topic in which to develop a nursing clinical question and gather data.
- Further narrowing the nursing topic into which population to explore, which intervention to measure, the comparison (or opposite) of the intervention, and the outcome that is being questioned.
- Developing a PICO.
- Development of a clinical question based on the inadequacies or gap in knowledge of current practice.
- Locating the best evidence with methodology of data gathering via a literature search.
- A synthesis of literature via systematic methods.
- Design/discuss the potential change, applying the synthesized evidence to present & discuss implications in practice that reflects this new understanding.
- Peer review of another group’s poster.
- Application of edits from received peer review.
- Presentation of findings/dissemination of knowledge via a poster presentation.
- Self-evaluation.
- Peer evaluation of others in their group.
The Final EBP Poster will include the following sections, utilizing a PowerPoint template provided:
- Introduction, including nursing clinical question
- Methodology (Databases utilized, inclusion/exclusion criteria, Boolean operators, key terms and/or phrases, publication years, etc.)
- Results (Objective)
- Discussion
- References
In addition, a presentation to act as dissemination will be part of the Final EBP Project grade.
Throughout the modules, you will notice the following symbols:
Hot Tip! – These are important and interesting tips that help to cement knowledge in interesting ways.
EBP Poster Application! – These help to keep on track with the EBP Poster Progress.
Critical Appraisal! – These apply critical appraisal questions applicable to the previous section.
Cover image: “A Medical Person Using a Laptop for Research” by Thirdman used with permission.
