Week 1 – Knowledge Development in Nursing

According to the AACN (2021), advanced nursing practice requires understanding nursing as a unique discipline and knowing its history and impact on healthcare (p. 27). Over the past 150 years, nursing has grown from informal caregiving to a respected academic and professional field. To understand this growth, it’s important to learn about nursing’s history and how its body of knowledge has developed. Advanced nursing education also involves learning how to use different tools and methods to develop, analyze, and apply nursing theories in practice, research, leadership, and teaching.

Objectives

By the end of this session, students will be able to:

1. Describe what makes something a science, a profession, and an academic discipline.
   
2. Explain why it’s important for nursing to be seen as all three.
   
3. Understand the different ways nurses gain knowledge.
   
4. Discuss how nursing knowledge has developed over time.
   
5. Compare different scientific viewpoints and how each creates knowledge.
   
6. Define nursing’s metaparadigm (core concepts of the discipline).
   
7. Explain how nursing theories are developed.
   
8. Describe how theory, research, and practice are connected in nursing.

Readings

Reading Assignment: Chapters 1, 2, and 20 + Review Attached PowerPoints

• Chapter 1:
  As you read, think about how nursing fits the definitions of a science, a profession, and an academic discipline. Reflect on why it’s important for nursing to be recognized in these ways, and what it takes to earn that recognition. This chapter also introduces different scientific and philosophical worldviews that matter in nursing, and how knowledge in nursing is developed through research.
  
• Chapter 2:
  This chapter covers the history of theory development in nursing and how theory is used in both practice and research. Pay attention to key terms related to building theories, the different types and levels of theories in nursing, and how these relate to research methods. You’ll also learn about the core concepts that define nursing—known as the “nursing metaparadigm” (usually four, sometimes five concepts).
  
• Chapter 20:
  Here, you’ll explore how theory is used in nursing research. Theories can guide research in three main ways:
  
  1. As a conceptual framework,
     
  2. As the focus of the study (theory testing), and
     
  3. As the outcome of the research (theory development).

Assignments

Discussion:

1. Be ready to talk about the history of nursing, how it became a profession, and how research, theory, and practice are all connected.