Nursing Lesson Plan: PDAs and Electronic Patient Records
This paper presents a lesson plan designed for graduate-level nursing students focused on the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to create, modify, and transmit Electronic Patient Records (EPRs). Drawing on Bloom's Taxonomy, the plan articulates educational, instructional, and behavioral learning objectives. It addresses three primary learner types—auditory, visual, and kinesthetic—and incorporates three teaching strategies: collaborative learning, active learning, and student-led instruction. The plan also outlines anticipatory set activities, closure assessments, and the instructional resources required for implementation in a large classroom or clinical environment.
- Overview and Context: Classroom setting, student profile, and lesson topic
- Learning Objectives: Educational, instructional, and behavioral objectives defined
- Learner Types: Auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learning styles described
- Teaching Strategies and Activities: Collaboration, active learning, and student-led instruction
- Anticipatory Set and Closure: Group presentations and individual competency demonstrations
- Instructional Resources: PDAs, computers, internet access, and software required
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What makes this paper effective
- The plan clearly differentiates three distinct types of learning objectives—educational, instructional, and behavioral—and ties each to a cited theoretical framework, giving the plan academic grounding.
- The explicit accommodation of all three learning styles (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic) demonstrates pedagogical awareness and broadens the plan's applicability to diverse student populations.
- Each teaching strategy is accompanied by an honest acknowledgment of its limitations, which strengthens the paper's credibility and shows critical thinking beyond surface-level description.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper consistently integrates peer-reviewed citations to justify instructional design decisions. Rather than simply asserting that a strategy works, the author anchors each claim in published research—for example, citing Hauer and Quill (2011) to support the competence-based framing of learning objectives, and Wittmann-Price and Fasolka (2010) to distinguish objectives from outcomes. This evidence-based approach is the defining academic technique of the paper.
Structure breakdown
The paper follows a logical instructional design sequence: it opens by establishing context and audience, moves through learning objectives (educational → instructional → behavioral), examines learner types, details three teaching strategies with critiques, and closes with anticipatory set activities, assessment closure, and resource requirements. This mirrors standard lesson plan architecture used in professional educational settings.
Overview and Context
This lesson plan is designed for implementation in a classroom setting with nursing students attending a graduate-level nursing course. The classroom does not necessarily have to be a physical space; the plan can equally be taught in a clinical environment. It can also be adapted for small groups or large classroom sizes. For this particular plan, the target audience is a large classroom of at least 20 graduate nursing students between the ages of 21 and 43 years old. The lesson topic involves both motor skills and technology, specifically the cognitive recognition of the capabilities of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) when used to create, modify, maintain, and transmit an Electronic Patient Record (EPR).
References
Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning (2010). Retrieved December 9, 2011, from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html
Hauer, J., & Quill, T. (2011). Educational needs assessment, development of learning objectives, and choosing a teaching approach. Journal of Palliative Medicine, 14(4), 503–508.
Sharma, S., Sastri, O., & Ahluwalia, P. K. (2010). Design of instructional objectives of undergraduate solid state physics course: A first step to physics education research. AIP Conference Proceedings, 1263(1), 171–174.
Tschannen, D., & Kalisch, B. J. (2009). The impact of nurse/physician collaboration on patient length of stay. Journal of Nursing Management, 17(7), 796–803.
Wittmann-Price, R. A., & Fasolka, B. J. (2010). Objectives and outcomes: The fundamental difference. Nursing Education Perspectives, 31(4), 233–236.
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