Practical training on examining ethical cases experienced by nursing students during clinical training and rubrics that develop thinking ability

Abstract

　This study aims to determine if the use of rubrics to practice examining ethical cases experienced during clinical training can stimulate “thinking” in nursing students. In this study, impressions collected from free descriptive responses were analyzed using text mining. The word appearance frequency analysis indicated that the term “think” appeared most frequently at 120 times, followed by “ethical issue” and “ethics,” which together appeared 141 times. In addition, the analysis of the frequency of syntactic dependency indicated that the most frequent words were “quality–high,” “patient–safe（ty）,” “behaviornecessary/necessity,” and “daily life–important,” indicating that nursing students thought that nursing quality, patientsʼ safety, and everyday life were of high importance. The word network analysis revealed that the terms “think,” “self,” “believe,” “patient,” “feel,” “ethical issue,” and “nursing” formed clusters, indicating that these terms were essential when nursing students expressed their learning about nursing ethical issues. Overall, “rubrics” and “ethical issues” lead to the term “think,” which suggests that assessing training in the examination of cases with an ethical aspect through the use of rubrics develops nursing studentsʼ thinking ability.