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Educational administrators, faculty, and students involved in nursing education are responsible for advancing the development, dissemination, and use of nursing knowledge. Nursing scholars have indicated that professional nurses are knowledge workers (Benner, 1984), using theoretical and practical nursing knowledge to guide nursing practice. Nurse educators should adequately prepare nursing students to fulfill this important mission.
The discipline of professional nursing is distinctive in its focus on the life processes, well-being, and optimum functioning of all individuals; human behavior in interaction with the environment; and positive changes to health status (Donaldson & Crowley, 1997). The empirical, ethical, personal, aesthetic (Carper, 1997), and sociopolitical (White, 1995) ways of knowing provide foundations that can direct current and future efforts in educating nursing students as knowledge workers in the discipline of nursing.
Nursing scholars have identified conceptual models of nursing as one way to unify and develop the knowledge base of nursing, consistent with the identified foci. The domain of nursing knowledge, or metaparadigm, which is a perspective distinctive from other disciplines, is the individual, the environment, nursing, and health (Fawcett, 2005). Nursing faculty may choose to use a nursing conceptual model, consistent with the philosophy of the school of nursing, to guide the curriculum. In addition to providing a distinctive frame of reference for nursing, conceptual models can help students apply the nursing process by helping them identify patient phenomena of interest to the discipline (Fawcett, 2005). Conceptual models of nursing provide structure and rationale for nursing activities. For example, the Neuman Systems Model focuses on reactions to stressors (Neuman & Fawcett, 2002), and the Roy Aadaptation Model focuses on adaption to environmental stimuli (Roy & Aandrews, 1999). Conceptual models provide a scientific view of nursing by clarifying the framework that guides the work of nursing. For example, data indicate that systems-based nursing models such as the Neuman Systems Model are appealing to faculties and applicable to the educational process (Lowery, 2002), and that a positive relationship exists between an integrated Neuman Systems-based curriculum and student scores on written papers and nursing care plans (Fulton, 1992). The Neuman Systems Model has been used effectively to...