Effects of Clinical Competency in Nursing Students following the Implementation of Student-Led Learning

Research and supporting evidence represent a gap identified in didactic learning between students and faculty. This gap shows emotional factors of the nursing curriculum that may suggest negative impacts on nursing students, but also improvements that can be made to increase students’ clinical competency levels. By adhering to strict definitions of student-led learning theory and clinical competency, we were able to create concrete evidence with measurable data that can contribute to the elimination of this gap in learning. Upon inspection of past text, we identified a need for further research on this topic to bring awareness and encourage this method to be implemented in more nursing programs. Past research played a key role in assisting our team to identify factors that contribute to students\u27 emotional impacts of nursing school and aided us in seeing how similar learning methods impacted students who participated. Our findings were gathered through the qualitative analysis of anonymous Google surveys in participants of our student-led skills labs. The survey allowed us to determine that each participant had a substantial improvement in skill level on the topics discussed, as well as an improvement in comfort level. These improvements in clinical competency and emotional influence help create a well-rounded nursing student. This program can be adjusted to encourage further skills practice and improvement in clinical judgment. Factors such as retention of skill and comfort level are continued to be studied and will be analyzed in December of 2023. We recommend there be a leading role as the program grows, ensuring the integrity and advancement of the program. We can say with confidence that our research contributed to past research, further supporting the implementation of student-led learning in the nursing curriculum at Murray State University