A perceptual study of high-fidelity patient simulation on learning confidence in African American nursing students

Future labor shortages might create a demand that exceeds the anticipated growth of the registered nursing workforce, especially nurses who are African American. To provide effective care to highly complex patient populations, novice nurses must be knowledgeable of and confident in their clinical skills. To recruit, retain, graduate, and prepare nursing students adequately, nursing educators are integrating confidence-building teaching strategies such as high-fidelity patient simulated (HFPS) experiences. This descriptive, correlational quantitative study examined whether a relationship existed among African American senior nursing students' perceptions of the instructional strategies of various ways of learning, active learning, expectations, and collaboration used with HFPS, and their association with perceived confidence in learning as measured by the National League for Nurses' Educational Practices and Student Satisfaction and Self-Confidence in Learning Questionnaires. The study also examined age and grade point average. Data were collected from two schools of nursing with a nonprobability convenience sample of 83 participants. Participants were asked for their perceptions of the use and importance of the four instructional strategies used in HFPS using two Likert-type scales that ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) and 1 (not important) to 5 (very important). The results showed that all four instructional strategies used in HFPS had a useful and important role. The demographic data that were obtained provided insight into specific age groups and instructional strategies that reflected a statistically significant relationship with self-confidence. Recommendations for further research on HFPS, self-confidence, and clinical competence focus on educational practices that achieve optimal learning outcomes for novice nurses.