The Relationship between Assessment Skills and Nursing Knowledge

This research aimed to clarify the relationship between nursing students’ levels of structural knowledge and assessment skills. Participants were 17 third-year university students majoring in nursing who participated individually in the experiments. The experiments included a nursingscene task, free-recall task, and sorting task. Experiments were conducted before and after their clinical practice. Each student’s level of structural knowledge was calculated from the free-recall and sorting task responses, and each student’s assessment skill was calculated from the nursingscene task responses. Levels of structural knowledge were significantly higher in post-examination compared with pre-examination (p < 0.01). Assessment skills scores were also significantly higher in post-examination compared with pre-examination (p < 0.001). When comparing assessment skills in relation to levels of structural knowledge, the high-structured group (n = 5) had significantly higher scores for their conclusions and reasons than the low-structured group (n = 5) (p < 0.001). Information-collecting scores in the task case did not differ between the low- and highstructured groups, although the high-structured group tended to mention information that was not included in the task case (p < 0.10). Well-structured knowledge of students in the high-structured group seemed to enable them to acquire and activate highly related information during assessment. Students in the high-structured group apparently made assessments not only by using information given but also by over viewing information comprehensively.