Question and answer sessions can help students develop their thinking and decision-making skills. Through targeted questions, tutors also can help nursing students develop their problem-solving abilities and deal with dummy situations that have a foundation in real life incidents. Questions raised by students and the answers they give to questions from tutors would also allow their guides to assess how much students have learned and whether they are on the right track or not.
The basis of self learning and evaluation is understanding that learning is not possible without total involvement of the student. Self-directed learning and evaluation allows students to take responsibility of their own learning and set their own teaching and learning goals. Self evaluation helps develop independence for students and helps them evaluate their own progress.
It increases the sense of achievement and satisfaction that students get from the teaching process. This teaching strategy also teaches students to critically evaluate their own work, which could be highly beneficial for them in a work environment.
Chien, Chan & Morrissey have described learning contracts as “a written mutual agreement between teachers and students and states clearly what a learner will do to achieve specific learning outcomes.” Learning contracts allow teachers and students to agree on goals for both classroom and practicum learning environments with students carrying greater responsibility for working towards achieving the goals. Tutors act as guides for the students to achieve those goals. Methods of evaluating the achievement of the goals also are agreed upon between students and tutors.
A learning contract would cover expectations, resources to be used for learning, documentation of what is learned, and criteria and timelines for the learning. Such learning contracts can extend beyond the program and help students continue learning from their mentors after they enter professional careers. They can develop an attitude towards lifelong learning in students.
Mapping makes use of graphics and designs to understand complex relationships and the possible outcomes of these relationships. In a nursing environment, it can help students connect conditions with treatments and potential side effects. Concept and problem mapping can develop the ability to see problems in their mind’s eye and improve creative thinking ability of students. Nursing practice often calls for innovative thinking from practitioners and concept mapping can train students to meet this requirement. Mapping can be applied with equal effectiveness to both individuals and groups.
There are a number of other innovative teaching strategies and techniques that can be applied effectively in nursing programs. A 2005 article in the "Journal of Education and Human Development" provides detailed information about these teaching strategies and studies that have established the effectiveness of these strategies.