Content area
Full text
Nursing education has undergone profound changes including the recent update of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN, 2021) Essentials, which has transitioned to a competency-based education approach. This has caused nursing faculty to rethink the way they teach by increasing the complexity of competencies required as students progress through a program and by preparing students to readily transfer knowledge from the classroom to the clinical setting (Mechtel et al., 2024; Reaves et al., 2024). Faculty have yet to reach a consensus on how to achieve these goals. One potential consideration, however, is durable learning: the teaching/learning techniques that lead to retained knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are stable over time and transferred from the classroom to practice settings (Kim, 2019). Durable learning techniques include retrieval practices, spaced-recall, and interleaving (i.e., spaced-out learning after new content is introduced) (Brown & Roediger, 2014). These techniques produce lasting learning and versatile applications to new situations. For faculty, durable learning relies on using active learning techniques that involve the students' higher-order thinking, such as clinical judgment, for cognitive and psychomotor skills. In doing so, learning endures beyond one-time lectures or a course examination (Cook & Babon, 2017; Roediger & Butler, 2011; Weeks et al., 2024) Durable learning is crucial to nursing education because it ensures that the future workforce not only acquires knowledge and skills but also retains and applies those skills to make sound clinical decisions, adapt to challenges, and maintain patient safety.
Background
Research on durable learning teaching techniques is extensive in other fields and recently has expanded to nursing education. However, a gap remains in consistently measuring student outcomes. Additionally, studies often use various active learning techniques, making it difficult to determine the effectiveness of student learning gains (Mechtel et al., 2024). Effective implementation of durable learning techniques relies on the educator's knowledge of effective teaching approaches, but in many cases, faculty's reliance on their personal preference and previous experience hinders the adoption of new teaching approaches, including durable learning techniques. Research on prelicensure nursing faculty's perceptions of teaching techniques is limited (Askell-Williams et al., 2012; Kim, 2019). Techniques reported in nursing education include (1)...