Becoming a Nurse: Student Experience of Transformation and Professional Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nursing education programs are designed to respond to the evolving requirements of nursing practice while supporting student transformation in becoming a nurse. Students in these programs often refer to them as academically challenging and stressful. The aim of this study was to understand the experience of nursing students compared to the general university student population and specifically, to explore if nursing students are perceiving more stress than students in other university programs. This study arises from an earlier study conducted annually for 4 years at a western Canadian university following the method referred to as the Harvard Assessment Seminar (Light, 2001). In the primary study, that is the study conducted annually for 4 years, random samples of university students were interviewed about their university experience; these samples included bachelor of nursing students. The study reported in this paper is a secondary analysis of the primary study’s data and explores the unique experience of nursing students within the context of the broader university community. A total of 358 semi-structured interviews comprised the data for the primary study. Of these interviews, 64 respondents (18%) were registered in the bachelor of nursing program. A directed content analysis technique was used to extend the existing research by using pre-existing coding categories and allowing other themes to emerge that appeared unique to nursing students. The overarching theme that emerged from the secondary data was “becoming a registered nurse (RN) through the experience of being a student.” Three thematic clusters characterized the undergraduate nursing student’s journey of transformation to becoming a registered nurse: learning through experience; recognizing the link between theory and practice; and transition and transformation. A key finding of the study is that the nursing student experience is fundamental to becoming a registered nurse. Through learning and practice experiences a transformation in personal identity takes place. Nursing faculty can support learning through experiences that foster transition and transformation. Nursing students experience stress. The difference between nursing students and undergraduate students in general is the focus of their stress: volume of work, readiness for practice, and their capacity, capability, and worthiness to fulfill the nursing role, along with their perceptions of balancing their study–work–personal life. The direct measurement of the amount of stress in nursing students and undergraduate students in general was not possible. This research study will add to the literature by describing the student nursing experience in undergraduate education as compared to the general university population. In addition, the authors provide recommendations for nurse educators that support successful student transition to becoming a nurse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".