School of Nursing: Connections

Video clips enhance student learning

Penny Vielma, left, Educational Outreach Program Manager, instructs FNP student Shannon Sheeks on the use of a digital video camera.

Teaching the fine points of pediatric health assessment is easier with a live model. But bringing young children to class can be difficult, particularly when an examination needs to be repeated several times for student understanding, and when the class size precludes a "front row" view for all. As a result of insights gained from taking a pediatric health assessment class last year, two family nurse practitioner students have worked with Dr. Gail Kieckhefer to implement a grant she received from the Health Sciences Center for Educational Resources (HSCER). The approach is to integrate videotaped examinations on the course web page. The video clips can be accessed from home computers and played over and over again for full comprehension. They can even be seen frame-by-frame if desired to pick up subtle nuances of the examination process.

Implementing the idea into a scholarly project entitled "Enhancing Web Photography for a Pediatric Health Assessment Class," Rachel Robison and Shannon Sheeks built on an earlier scholarly project by Anne Stevens to facilitate instruction of the course materials. Robison and Sheeks identified skills best learned through visual presentation, wrote scripts to complement different assessment techniques, found young subjects ranging from six weeks to nine years, and learned to operate the digital video camera with the assistance of Educational Outreach program manager Penny Vielma. The students worked with Vielma and class instructor Kieckhefer during the spring and summer quarters, learning the fine points of video taping and evaluating the results. Each taping session took from 15 minutes to one hour, depending on the age of the child, the number of techniques illustrated, and difficulty of gaining the "perfect" video image.

Students taking the pediatric health assessment class reaped the benefits this fall, when the new video segments were first made available on the course web page. Since Kieckhefer has already created the syllabus for the course, it was a logical next step to create and integrate these videotaped demonstrations. Ultimately, with an additional grant from HSCER, these efforts will enhance the understanding of students on site as well as those enrolled in distance learning courses using web-based instruction.

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