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Forma mentis networks map how nursing and engineering students enhance their mindsets about innovation and health during professional growth.

ABSTRACT: Reconstructing a "forma mentis", a mindset, and its changes, means capturing how individuals perceive topics, trends and experiences over time. To this aim we use forma mentis networks (FMNs), which enable direct, microscopic access to how individuals conceptually perceive knowledge and sentiment around a topic, providing richer contextual information than machine learning. FMNs build cognitive representations of stances through psycholinguistic tools like conceptual associations from semantic memory (free associations, i.e., one concept eliciting another) and affect norms (valence, i.e., how attractive a concept is). We test FMNs by investigating how Norwegian nursing and engineering students perceived innovation and health before and after a 2-month research project in e-health. We built and analysed FMNs by six individuals, based on 75 cues about innovation and health, and leading to 1,000 associations between 730 concepts. We repeated this procedure before and after the project. When investigating changes over time, individual FMNs highlighted drastic improvements in all students' stances towards "teamwork", "collaboration", "engineering" and "future", indicating the acquisition and strengthening of a positive belief about innovation. Nursing students improved their perception of 'robots" and "technology" and related them to the future of nursing. A group-level analysis related these changes to the emergence, during the project, of conceptual associations about openness towards multidisciplinary collaboration, and a positive, leadership-oriented group dynamics. The whole group identified "mathematics" and "coding" as highly relevant concepts after the project. When investigating persistent associations, characterising the core of students' mindsets, network distance entropy and closeness identified as pivotal in the students' mindsets concepts related to "personal well-being", "professional growth" and "teamwork". This result aligns with and extends previous studies reporting the relevance of teamwork and personal well-being for Norwegian healthcare professionals, also within the novel e-health sector. Our analysis indicates that forma mentis networks are powerful proxies for detecting individual- and group-level mindset changes due to professional growth. FMNs open new scenarios for data-informed, multidisciplinary interventions aimed at professional training in innovation.

SUBMITTER: Stella M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7924483 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:In order to investigate how high school students and researchers perceive science-related (STEM) subjects, we introduce forma mentis networks. This framework models how people conceptually structure their stance, mindset or forma mentis toward a given topic. In this study, we build forma mentis networks revolving around STEM and based on psycholinguistic data, namely free associations of STEM concepts (i.e., which words are elicited first and associated by students/researchers reading "science"?) and their valence ratings concepts (i.e., is "science" perceived as positive, negative or neutral by students/researchers?). We construct separate networks for (Ns = 159) Italian high school students and (Nr = 59) interdisciplinary professionals and researchers in order to investigate how these groups differ in their conceptual knowledge and emotional perception of STEM. Our analysis of forma mentis networks at various scales indicate that, like researchers, students perceived "science" as a strongly positive entity. However, differently from researchers, students identified STEM subjects like "physics" and "mathematics" as negative and associated them with other negative STEM-related concepts. We call this surrounding of negative associations a negative emotional aura. Cross-validation with external datasets indicated that the negative emotional auras of physics, maths and statistics in the students' forma mentis network related to science anxiety. Furthermore, considering the semantic associates of "mathematics" and "physics" revealed that negative auras may originate from a bleak, dry perception of the technical methodology and mnemonic tools taught in these subjects (e.g., calculus rules). Overall, our results underline the crucial importance of emphasizing nontechnical and applied aspects of STEM disciplines, beyond purely methodological teaching. The quantitative insights achieved through forma mentis networks highlight the necessity of establishing novel pedagogic and interdisciplinary links between science, its real-world complexity, and creativity in science learning in order to enhance the impact of STEM education, learning and outreach activities.

Project description:BackgroundDuring education it is essential for nursing students to develop professionalism in nursing. Nurses are placed in situations based on trust, and it is crucial that their patients have confidence in them to provide professional and safe care. A key period in nursing students' development of a professionalism occurs during training when students gain knowledge and skills that separate nurses as professional healthcare workers from laypeople. The purpose of this study was to investigate nursing students' experiences of professional competence development during education.MethodsA longitudinal study was carried out using qualitative content analysis with a manifest inductive approach. Thirty-four students enrolled in a Swedish three-year nursing program, from August 2015 to January 2017 were interviewed on four occasions.ResultsThe results revealed that students' professional role developed gradually. The students' started their education with dreams and a naive understanding of the profession, but their understanding of the complexity of the nursing profession gradually evolved. Students became theoretically equipped at the university and developed clinical skills through practice. Students' focus went from mastering medical technology to a more holistic approach. Before graduating, students felt ready but not fully trained.ConclusionsOur findings indicate a discrepancy between the content of the theoretical education and the clinical settings since students identified a lack of evidence-based practice. A solid theoretical education before entering clinical training offered students possibilities for reflecting on evidence-based practice and the clinical settings. The realization that there is always potential for professional improvement can be interpreted as an emerging awareness, and development of professionalism. It is clear that students could benefit from increased collaborative work between clinical supervisors and faculty staff at the university.

Project description:Background/objectiveQuality innovation networks' (QINs') support of nursing homes (NHs) is a national strategy to systematically improve the quality of care experienced by residents. QINs have been tasked with providing NHs with information, resources, tools, and training to assist in developing best practices and to support quality improvement efforts in infection prevention (including joining the National Healthcare Safety Network [NHSN]), avoid unnecessary hospitalizations, and increase use of hospice and palliative care. Our objective was to examine QIN online resources provided to NHs to support best practices and improvement efforts.DesignAn environmental scan was conducted.Setting/measurementEach QIN website was evaluated on (1) usability, (2) accessibility and prominence, (3) website design, (4) availability of training materials, (5) recency of update, (6) identification of key personnel, and (8) quality focus areas (ie, infection prevention, NHSN, antibiotic stewardship, reducing unnecessary or avoidable hospitalizations, and palliative and hospice care).ResultsQIN websites varied dramatically in design and resources offered to NHs as well as in the content and ease of finding information. Antibiotic stewardship and NHSN resources were widely available. Information (ie, fact sheets) on reducing avoidable hospitalizations was commonly available, while resources, such as tool kits, webinars, training, and contact information for personnel on reducing avoidable hospitalizations, were available to 23 states. Infection prevention resources were varied and limited to 34 states. Both palliative care and hospice resources were available through only a few QINs (13 states and 20 states, respectively).ConclusionsGiven that much of the information, tool kits, and resources are standardized and in the public domain, centralized resources with tailored or specialized links to unique local resources, like in-person trainings and state-specific contact information, could be more beneficial for NHs. J Am Geriatr Soc 67:2376-2381, 2019.

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Forma mentis networks map how nursing and engineering students enhance their mindsets about innovation and health during professional growth.

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