Nursing Education and Deep Learning and Multiple Intelligence Concept
Deep Learning Concept In Nursing Education
Deep learning (vs. surface learning) is learning to understand and create meaning (Smith & Colby, 2007). Learners become more persistent and able to contend with more challenging learning situations (Majeski & Stover, 2007). Whittman Price and Godshall (2009) discussed deep, strategic, and surface learning.
Surface learning is usually extrinsically motivated and involves memorizing information, often for tests. Deep learning, in contrast, is intrinsically motivated and involves a desire to learn in order to understand. Strategic learning is a combination of deep and surface learning, with students being goal oriented and doing what is necessary to achieve their goals.
Premise of Deep Learning In Nursing Education
Deep learning is an intentional, intrinsically motivated strategy to understand and connect knowledge to create new meaning and actions. Deep learning is related to cognitive and information processing theories in which learning from short-term memory is transferred to long-term memory with repetition and practice.
Implications of Deep Learning In Nursing Education
Deep learning can be fostered in classroom or clinical settings that offer the time and space for interactive discourse. Faculty can create opportunities for students to learn facts and concepts for application in clinical settings. Case studies, unfolding case studies, and simulation and clinical learning experiences facilitate deep learning.
Concept mapping also promotes deep learning (Hay, 2007). Students need to regularly assess their learning and be actively engaged in the learning process with peers and teachers. Students benefit through a more conceptual understanding that fosters meaning and relevance (Clare, 2007).
Multiple Intelligence Concept In Nursing Education
Gardner (1983) challenged the classical view of intelligence and posited that there is a plurality of intellects. The idea of MI began with a preliminary list of seven constructs: bodily-kinesthetic, visualspatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical-rhythmic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (Gardner, 1983).
Two additional intelligences have been added: naturalist and existential (Bowles, 2008; Moran, Kornhaber & Gardner, 2006). The theory suggests that individuals differ in the intelligence profiles they are born with and that profiles work in harmony, changing as influenced by experience and learning throughout life. Incorporating the MI in designing and executing instruction enhances student learning (Holland, 2007).
Premise of Multiple Intelligence In Nursing Education
Every human being has a unique intelligence profile and expresses the intelligences in varying degrees. Although in any one person, one or more of the intelligences may be demonstrated at a higher operant level than the others, it is in the working together of the intelligences that a person solves problems and interacts with the environment. The goal of education is to develop all intelligences in a holistic way.
Implications of Multiple Intelligence In Nursing Education
Although not a prescriptive theory, MI provides a framework for understanding intelligence that can benefit both students and teachers. Faculty can empower students to recognize their own unique gifts to the nursing encounter by acknowledging profiles of problem-solving abilities that consider more than the narrow range of verbal linguistic and logical mathematical abilities traditionally associated with intelligence quotient testing.
MI may be helpful in tapping into student creativity. Qualities identified in all of the categories can contribute to an optimal patient encounter in a practice profession such as nursing. Because most intelligence tests tap only the logical-mathematical and verbal linguistic intelligences, students enter nursing with documentation that only partially identifies preparation for nursing.
Faculty has the opportunity, using the MI theory, to focus on each student’s unique profile and to use students’ strengths to enhance contributions to practice and the profession. The student can use the MI theory for self-evaluation and for the evaluation of others. Because there is no hierarchy in the MI theory, no intelligence is thought to be of higher value than any other.
The student may enjoy the recognition of untested, undocumented, yet affirmed abilities that can contribute to his or her success in nursing. Students can find direction for within-nursing vocations, as well as other social choices, by giving attention to their personal profiles.
A broader, more comprehensive view of the intelligences that nurses, students, faculty, and other health care professionals bring to the learning encounter can contribute to greater understanding of potential nursing interactions. The complexity of MI and individual profiles mirrors the complexity of holistic nursing.
Specific and broadened attention to course and clinical learning goals relative to the constructs in the MI theory may contribute to greater student success and satisfying professional performance.
The main focus of the educational experience is the learner as active participant in transaction with the teacher, peers, and the larger environment. Students are given considerable control over the development of learning experiences, and they construct and create knowledge.
Faculty assume a primary role as designers of the learning environment and learning experiences in a shared governance approach with students and others contributing to the learning climate. Faculty continue to learn as they teach, thus evolving in their educational philosophy and teaching style.
The learning theories and frameworks presented in this chapter provide a guide for faculty to use within the four steps of the teaching–learning process. Each theory or framework has varying degrees of usefulness depending on the faculty’s philosophy about teaching; the philosophy that guides the curriculum; the setting and climate in which the teaching is to occur; student characteristics; and the purpose, nature, and content of the course.
Within these contextual variables, faculty need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each theory or framework and select those that are most appropriate. The shift to the learning paradigm ensures that learners will construct and create knowledge and faculty serve as designers, facilitators, coaches, guides, and mentors.
For most learning experiences in higher education and for nursing in particular, behavioral principles have limited relevance. Current and emerging concepts and principles in the neuroscience of learning, cognitive, humanistic, and adult learning theories and Perry’s model for intellectual and cognitive development, as well as those included in the interpretive pedagogies, patterns of knowing, narrative pedagogies, and caring, are consistent with the thrust of a learning paradigm to guide nursing education.
There is constant interaction as faculty create the environment and contextual learning experiences and the student assumes control over learning through active engagement.