Assessment of Nursing Student Numeracy

Background: This study addresses the question, what are the numeracy skills of RN students? The reason for asking this question is the documented deficiency in numeracy skills published for both nursing students and employees. Purpose: Nurses need numeracy skills to calculate drug dosage and IV flow rates as part of safe patient care. The purpose of this study is to target instructional support for improved nurse numeracy skills, toward the end of improved patient care. Methods: The current study employed a math test administered to 47 community college RN students. The test assessed both general and clinical numeracy skills. The hypothesis was that test results would identify specific skills that could be targeted for intervention at the pre-RN program (high school), RN program, or professional development levels. Results: Data showed RN students most in need of intervention in decimal and percent use for general skills, with application to drug dosages requiring multiple unit conversions. Clinical numeracy scores correlated significantly with general numeracy scores. Contrast among first vs. later semester RN students showed that scores of first semester students were higher than for those further progressed in the program. Conclusion: These data suggest a need for increased instruction in decimal and percent operations, and use of these operations to compute drug dosage in a context of proportion or dimensional analysis. These data also emphasize the importance of admission criteria and continuing education in dosage calculation.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Education

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Higher Education Leadership and Policy

Grantor

University of Houston

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Moses, Stephanie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Robin, Bernard R.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Watson, Margaret
• McNeil, Sara G.
• Hausmann, Robert C.

• Nurse student numeracy
• Drug dosage calculation

Statement dc:rights

• The author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10657/2675

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uh-ir.tdl.org:10657/2675