Award Date
5-1-2017
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Teaching and Learning
First Committee Member
Steven Grubaugh
Second Committee Member
Howard R. Gordon
Third Committee Member
Greg Levitt
Fourth Committee Member
Wolf Bein
Number of Pages
287
Abstract
Life and death represent the nursing field, and to a number of educators, helping nursing students to develop effective writing skills is equally seen as a life and death matter. A lack of proficiency in writing may literally be the death of a nursing student’s college hopes, but more importantly is the thought that a lack of proficient writing skills by nurses may mean the death of patients. Peer-reviewed studies suggest that 440,000 patients die annually in hospitals due to mistakes called adverse events (AE’s). According to research, a lack of proper communication, including written communication, represents the third leading cause of AE’s. This study showed that postsecondary nursing curricula needs to instill greater emphasis on writing proficiency.
This study combined nursing, literacy and technology to determine what needed to be done to assist postsecondary nursing educators to produce more proficient student writers. It was my vision to develop prototype software to be used in postsecondary nursing programs to teach and evaluate the writing of important health care genres produced by postsecondary nursing students. This research began with a needs assessment survey that elicited information from postsecondary nursing professors concerning what features they felt were necessary in a writing instruction and assessment app. The second portion of research featured a participatory design survey to prioritize the items that were requested as software features. The third phase of this research involved creating a prototype of the software based on data gathered from the participants.
Keywords
communications; healthcare; literacy; programming; technology; vocational
Disciplines
Communication | Education
File Format
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Deever, Donald Allen, "Preventing Deaths by Writing: In Search of a Prescriptive Software Solution for Curing Student Writing Ills in Postsecondary Nursing Education" (2017). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 2962.
http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/10985850
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/