Research learning in nursing education: exploring the scope of troublesomeness

Research skills and methods are an integral part of the undergraduate nursing curriculum, underpinning the use of research evidence in practice. Understanding the research process and research methods are thresholds which students need to pass through to support their development into evidence-based practitioners. However research evidence suggests that undergraduate nursing students find research skills and methods troublesome and this is a significant barrier to learning. Troublesome research knowledge can be readily aligned with existing understanding of troublesome knowledge, as identified by Perkins (1999). For example Ax and Kincade (2001) identified counter-intuitive knowledge in the term “research ” because of the everyday usage of research as being simply to find out about something. In the threshold concepts literature, aspects of research learning have been found to be troublesome in other disciplines, e.g. Taylor and Meyer’s (2010) work on hypothesis development in biology and Kiley and Wisker’s (2009) study of research learning in doctoral students. A narrative research study was undertaken to investigate research learning in undergraduate nursing education using threshold concepts as a framework. Seventeen nursing students were interviewed in depth about their experiences of learning about research. Learning narratives were gathered an