The IOM identified medication errors as one of the leading causes of death and injury. More than 7,000 hospitalized Americans die yearly as a result of medication errors. The National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention determined that errors are caused by both practicing nurses and students. This study will evaluate a new strategy for reducing medication errors. This study is based on two related learning theories, Constructivist Learning and Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theories; describing learning as active processes in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge. The study design will be a pretest-posttest time lagged control group with repeated measures, allowing evaluation of the efficacy of Authentic World’s Dosage Calculations software to improve dose calculation. Authentic World’s software builds on nursing students’ current/past knowledge of mathematical skills, coupled with pharmacological information to advance their dosage calculation skills, providing an understanding for not just the math processes involved, but their meaning, and practical implementation. The sample will be 100 pre-licensure nursing students randomly assigned to two groups; both groups will receive the intervention by study completion. Following pretest, students will use an interactive multimedia computer program, Authentic World’s Medication Dosage Calculations. Posttest dose calculation performance will be measured immediately following completion of the program and again at one and two months. After two months, software will be given to the second group, with the same testing protocol as in group one. The measure of dosage calculation performance will be a tool included in the Authentic World’s software. Raw scores for each group will be generated from the two measures. Analysis of covariance where the pretest score serves as the single covariate will be used to evaluate the two groups over time.
Session #1222 - Undergraduate Submissions
The 29th Annual MNRS Research Conference (April 1-4, 2005)