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ABSTRACT
This article explores the concept of evidence-based nursing education. Because nurse educators incorporate evidence-based practice as a basic tenet of their programs, they assume nursing education itself is evidence based. Nursing education has a body of knowledge on which nurse educators base teaching, educational strategies, and curricular designs, but most of this knowledge is tacit, experiential, and based on practice. This knowledge relates to the art of teaching in nursing and can warrant the practice of nurse educators. However, research is also necessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of teaching approaches and strategies. Nurse educators need to develop the science of nursing education through qualitative and quantitative research, to add to the tacit knowledge underpinning nursing education strategies. When the science of nursing education is adequately developed through rigorous research, we will truly be able to say that nursing education is evidence based. Until then, it may be only a myth.
Evidence-based practice is an approach to clinical decision making that nursing has enthusiastically adopted. As with the nursing profession in general, nurse educators have quickly picked up the mantra of evidence-based practice, and have implemented innovative curricular designs and teaching strategies to provide students with opportunities to learn and practice evidencebased nursing. As an outcome of such an approach, nurse educators anticipate that graduates will enter nursing practice with the ability to provide effective nursing care, based on the best available evidence.
Although the concept of evidence-based practice is widespread and pervasive in nursing education, one must question whether it has actually been applied to nursing education. Are curricular and pedagogical decisions in nursing education based on the best available evidence? In times of nursing and faculty shortages, resource limitations, and health care reforms, nursing education practices must also be effective. Adapting DiCenso and Cullum's (1998) definition of evidence-based nursing, evidencebased nursing education can be viewed as consisting of four elements: evidence, professional judgment of nurse educators, the values of students as clients, and resource issues. This article explores these four elements and the implications of evidence-based nursing education, with a focus on nursing's research agenda and the science of nursing education.
EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE
Sackett, Rosenberg, Gray, Haynes, and Richardson (1996) defined evidence-based medicine as the conscious, explicit, and judicious use of the...