| dc.description.abstract | Medication administration is an important task and responsibility of registered nurses. Unfortunately, medication errors are an internationally significant reason for injury and death in patients. The most common type of error is related to calculations, e.g. "wrong dose". The overarching aim of this master thesis was therefore to develop and explore a learning system that increases nursing students ability to gain knowledge and understanding in medication calculations.
Adaptive learning technology offers improvements over traditional, static learning technology by tailoring the learning environment to each individual learner instead of providing the same educational material, presentation and navigation to all learners in a one size fits all model. This thesis aimed to develop and explore how individual learner's state of knowledge and learning needs could be modelled and used to adapt learning resources and exercises in an adaptive learning system in medication calculation.
An adaptive learning system was designed and developed where exercises were adapted to each learner's state of knowledge, meaning that the exercises were adjusted to an appropriate level of difficulty relative to the learner s current state of knowledge. As the learner s skill in calculations increased so did the difficulty of the exercises. The learning system also adapted the exercises based on the learner s current learning needs, e.g. to practice on exercises in a category the learner has low knowledge of, to repeat an exercise that the learner recently answered incorrectly, or to repeat an exercise from category that the learner already has mastered in order to maintain that knowledge.
An evaluation was performed to test how health care practitioners; nursing students, nursing teachers and registered nurses experienced the adaptivity of the learning system. They experienced that the adaptive learning system adapted the difficulty of the exercises to an appropriate level, they got support and guidance on exercises they found difficult and challenging, and the exercises were repeated at a reasonable interval so that in a short time they had the opportunity to correct any errors or that they got training on tasks they had previously mastered a while ago. Overall the users reported that the adaptive learning system in this project would be a useful learning resource when learning and maintaining medication calculation skills. | |
