Kaitlyn Picard, MS, RN, CCRN, CNE-cl is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Nursing and instructional design coordinator for the School of Nursing at the University of Rochester. In this role, she collaborates with course faculty to create learning activities and assessments that effectively build competence and ensure students are practice-ready.

Kaitlyn and the faculty recognized a need to incorporate more deliberate practice opportunities that allow students to master key foundational skills, like sterile field setup and inserting catheters.

"We were hearing over and over from our clinical faculty that students were not competent with specific skills [like IV medication administration] by the time they reached the last semester,"¹ she explains. This finding is not specific to the University of Rochester's nursing program. It's well-documented in the nursing education literature that new graduate nurses are not fully prepared for practice.²

To fill the gap, they needed to find ways to build in more practice opportunities, including:

• additional practice in and outside of the lab in their 12-Month Accelerated Bachelor's in Nursing program
• independent, remote practice in their hybrid-online 24-Month Accelerated Bachelor's in Nursing program

Supporting Competency-Based Education

The emphasis on increased practice opportunities supports the program’s shift to competency-based education (CBE).

"One of the key pieces [in CBE] is to have repeated exposure. You really need to ensure that students have multiple opportunities to practice whichever competency they’re trying to build."

- Kaitlyn Picard, MS, RN, CCRN, CNE-cl
Assistant Professor of Clinical Nursing, University of Rochester School of Nursing in Rochester, New York

Kaitlyn and the faculty use the backward design framework to help their shift to CBE. This framework involves identifying an end goal – in this case, competency in specific high-impact skills – and then working backward to align activities and assessments to help students meet the goal.³

“We worked together using the backward design framework to really ensure all learning activities and assessments were aligned throughout the course, but also throughout the curriculum,”⁴ she explains.

To address the need for more deliberate practice to help build competency, Kaitlyn and the faculty decided to try SimCapture for Skills paired with the Modular Skills Trainer.  SimCapture for Skills is a digital assessment and evaluation tool that supports student-driven learning. It works with the Modular Skills Trainer to:

• Provide opportunities for deliberate, asynchronous practice of fundamental skills – from anywhere.
  "What’s nice with the Modular Skills Trainers is that they have the key pieces that you need to practice high-impact skills – and you can really do that in any environment," she says. Students can practice repeatedly until they’re confident.
• Provide efficient, self or peer evaluation using objective, built-in checklists.
  "Because we have the skills checklists built into SimCapture, when students are ready to practice, they can pull up their skills checklist in SimCapture and they can choose to record themselves so that then they can perform a self-evaluation," she explains. "They can [also] do peer evaluation in real time. You can connect with a peer who could be in a completely different environment because of the virtual connection. And they can watch you in real time and complete the peer evaluation right in the checklist in SimCapture."
• Track learners' progression with robust data reporting to verify competency.
  “There’s a ton of data you can capture in SimCapture,” she says. The data yields insights on progression at the individual and cohort level. And, it also provides visibility into how much time the students spend on skills practice.

Utilizing SimCapture for Skills with the Modular Skills Trainer helped Kaitlyn and the faculty in several areas.