The Use of an Unfolding Case Study to Enhance Self-Efficacy in Nursing Students

Nurse educators are challenged with preparing new nurse graduates that can function in the current healthcare practice environment of high patient acuity, morbidities, and information technology while maintaining patient safety and quality care management (Cronenwett et al., 2007). Therefore, nurse educators are amenable to exploring alternative teaching pedagogies that provide students with engaging learning opportunities that simulate real-life clinical scenarios they may encounter in professional nursing practice. This study explored the use of an unfolding case study as an innovative teaching strategy to enhance the perception of student self-efficacy. A one-group pretest-posttest descriptive design with a convenience sample of 17 second year associate degree nursing students enrolled in a complex health concepts course was utilized. The General Self-Efficacy Scale was used to measure perceived self-efficacy pre- and post- participation in an unfolding case study. The pretest mean was 3.20 (sd = 0.356) and the posttest mean was 3.38 (sd =0.396). The paired t-test result was 0.182 (sd = 0.300) with a statistical significance of 0.024.The results of this study supported the use of an unfolding case study as a teaching pedagogy to enhance nursing students’ self-efficacy as they transition to enter professional nursing. Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977, 1986) and situation learning theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991) guided the conceptual framework of this study