Visual thinking para la mejora del aprendizaje en ciencias de la salud

Abstract

Patient safety is the essence of Nursing and a transversal element throughout the Degree. Therefore,the dosage calculation is considered a key factor. In coordination meetings of the teaching innovationgroup, issues were detected in the development of the cognitive process of dose calculation, whichrepeated in other subjects in which mathematical calculations are performed. Therefore, we found necessaryto introduce methodologies to facilitate this learning, starting off with a basic subject in 1st yearand 1st semester, Information Systems and data analysis, in which these cognitive elements (deductiveand inductive) are worked with .Once having the most appropriate methodologies checked out, it was decided the use of VisualThinking (VT), since visual learning reinforces the first steps of learning Bloom’s Taxonomy, so in the2018/19 course that methodology was introduced.Objective: to analyze if the use of VT improves the learning results in the subject of InformationSystems and data analysis.Methodology: The target population were two cohorts of 116 and 122 students (87,1% and 91% ofwomen) regarding the first-year students of the academic courses 2017/18 and 2018/19, differentiated into two language lines (Basque and Spanish), with very heterogeneous characteristics regarding groupsize, age and access route.Two types of exercises (deductive and inductive) are analyzed, performed in different sessionsduring the 2017/18 and 2018/19 courses, using the Mann-Whitney nonparametric U-test to comparethe results of both courses.Results: Although the results obtained did not show a clear improvement in the first session ofeach type of exercise (even though significant in the larger language group p < 0.001), in the second sessionan increase of 0,46 and 0,70 points was found in the grades of the deductive and inductive componentsrespectively (p < 0,001).Conclusions: The use of Visual Thinking has produced a significant improvement in learningrelated to mathematical calculations. However, we must continue to investigate to ratify these results.