To examine undergraduate nursing students’ views on the value of clinically based research screencasts on their intention to engage with research and the research of others. August 2010

The main purpose of this project was to develop authentic, locally-based clinical research screencasts and then evaluate their use in a blended learning course on research methods with undergraduate nursing students. The rationale for using the screencasts was to show students’ the relevance of research to practice, and thereby strengthen their intentions to engage with appropriate research literature. The project also incorporates the use of an electronic voting system (clickers) in a quiz format to assess student knowledge and understanding following every teaching session. An additional objective of the project was to enhance the research capabilities of an experienced lecturer but new to research, and a third year nursing student who had expressed enthusiasm to be involved in a research project. This exploratory study did show a statistically significant difference between students’ intentions to engage with research and research literature following exposure to both the quantitative and qualitative screencast interventions. However, this result although statistically significant, cannot be relied upon as the limitations described in the previous section do reduce confidence in the findings. In the overall evaluations the students valued the screencasts as a teaching device, recognising that they did demonstrate the importance of research to clinical practice. The ‘clickers’ were also highly rated by the students as a fun way to cement their understanding of the teaching sessions without exposing them to the group for their lack of knowledge. However, the ‘clicker’ quiz results did not show differences between the pre and post intervention understanding or knowledge of the topic area discussed in the teaching sessions. This result indicates that the screencasts did not improve understanding or retention of research in the short-term, but the study did not evaluate longer-term knowledge retention, which may have demonstrated a difference. In conclusion, this project does indicate that it would be profitable to further test the use of screencasts as an integrated part of a blended learning programme on research methods with a much larger sample of students using an experimental approach with a control group for comparison. This comparison could also evaluate the use of local and generically produced research screencasts. In addition, this study has been a practical framework for facilitating professional development through the participation and reflective accounts of a student nurse and lecturer inexperienced with research project administration.