Performance Discovery and Peer Feedback at Nursing Schools

College can be overwhelming at times. It becomes difficult to balance multiple classes and learn a wide variety of curriculum, and this is especially true for students in nursing school. These students must attend labs, clinicals, and lectures, each teaching them a wide variety of practices and procedures. And there’s an added pressure to learn and fully understand subject matter; where making the slightest mistake in the medical field could mean the difference between life and death.

Luckily, before they’re working with real patients in hospitals and nursing homes, nursing students practice extensively in the classroom. However, even though they’re able to get valuable experience in an academic setting, these students are often unsure if they’re performing procedures correctly. On average, nursing school instructors have somewhere between 100 and 200 students a semester, and the ratio of professionals to students in lab sessions is around 1:8 (Rowan). With that in mind, there’s no feasible way for educators to give each student direct feedback for every process performed in class.

Peer feedback has proven to be a valuable resource in the field of medical education. When nursing students work in pairs or groups, they’re able to learn from their own mistakes and triumphs, as well as those of others. Their peers can validate that they’re doing something correctly, and help them adjust if they’re not performing adequately. Working with peers in the classroom encourages “helping and promoting learning through constructive feedback” (Hunukumbure).

The use of technology can further the benefits of peer review in medical education. Instead of just relying on what students remember about their performance or the performance of their peers, they can go back and watch a video of what they’ve done and find potential areas for improvement. Studies that utilized video peer review in nursing labs “made [students] feel more confident” and “gave [them] a feeling of pride” in their field (Rowan).

Vosaic allows users to take, share, and annotate videos at any time. This enables nursing students to provide and receive more meaningful feedback. Each student has the opportunity to watch themselves and learn what they’re doing successfully and where they can improve. Vosaic helps to build a promising future for the medical field.

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