Abstract
The purposes of this study are as follows: 1.to clarify the lessons learned by student nurses who had the experience of attending terminal patients and 2.to obtain basic data for considering the educational strategies for students who attend terminal patients. Ten students were required after their training to write freely about the lessons that they learned or the impressions that they acquired from their experiences of attending terminal patients during the nursing practice. As a result, seven categories were derived from analyzing the contents of the students' responses about changes in their knowledge, emotion and behavior. The conclusion was seen as follows: 1.Their views of nursing and of life and death were deepened by self-introspection and this knowledge enabled them to more successfully nurse dying patients and 2. An opposing pattern that caused them to fail to introspect, creating a lack of understanding, fear of the approaching death of the patients and leading to excessive fervor in nursing dying patients. The findings also implied that it was necessary for the trainers to conduct an educational intervention to lead the students to shift their emotional focus from themselves to others lest they should lack in understanding or escape from themselves.
