Clinical Judgment and Evidence-Based Practice: Toward Pedagogies of Integration

EXCERPT

In this issue of the Journal of Nursing Education, you’ll find several groundbreaking articles about two topics of central concern to nurse educators: clinical judgment/clinical decision making and evidence-based practice. Baxter and Boblin describe the kind of decisions prelicensure students make and how those decisions evolve over time. The authors remind us that there are many important decisions in any interaction with a client—for example, assessment decisions, what information to gather and how to gather it, intervention decisions, resource decisions, and so on—that provide a potentially useful framework for helping students recognize the many decisions they make throughout the day. Bartlett et al. describe the use of the Outcome-Present State Test (OPT) model to teach students clinical reasoning and the use of taxonomies of diagnoses, interventions, and outcomes. They provide evidence that students can fairly readily learn to use this model.