Module 4 Evidence Based Practice: Finding the Evidence
Submit by the due date and time listed in your syllabus.
Overview
This assignment will allow you to create an evidence-based practice project that includes the development of a PICO question and follows the initial steps of the Iowa Model. You will share your findings using an APA formatted paper.
Submitting your assignment
· Save this document to your desktop as a Word document.
· Open the document from your desktop and review the assignment instructions and grading rubric.
· Create a separate Word document for your paper. (You will convert it to pdf form before you submit it).
· Return to the course and upload your paper and your source articles to the assignment submission link.
Please note:
if you forget to upload your source articles, up to 5 points penalty will be applied to your paper.
Grading Rubric
See the grading rubric posted in the assignment link to guide your work. Points are awarded for each section based on content and clarity of expression.
Instructions for Completing Your Assignment
·
Step one:
Using the topic you chose,
identify a nursing clinical practice question that you would like to explore.
·
Step two: You may use the PICO(T) question in the final form approved by your instructor or coach. We will give you feedback on questions and articles up until Wednesday before the assignment is due. If you have not had a question or article approved by that time, carefully review the instructions for what constitutes an acceptable PICO question and what constitutes an acceptable article.
·
Step three: Search for a nursing quantitative research article that relates to your PICO question using Academic Search Complete, CINAHL, Pubmed, Google Scholar, or any other database that contains nursing research articles.
Please note: you can use the article that you submitted in Module Two to meet this requirement so long as it was approved.
·
The article you will find must meet the following mandatory requirements:
· It must be based on the approved topic list unless other arrangements were made with your instructor or coach.
· It must be from a
nursing research journal or have a
nurse as an author or
be a study about nurses.
· It must be no more than 5 years old from the current publication year.
· It must include implications and / or interventions that are applicable to nursing practice.
· It may not be a retrospective study (exeption: you may use secondary analysis of population based datasets), a qualitative article, systematic review, meta-synthesis, meta-analysis, meta-summary, integrative review or a quality improvement study. For more information on how to recognize these types of article see Grove & Gray (2019) pp. 21-23.
· It may not be a clinical information article or “how-to” article.
·
Step Four: Collecting More Evidence (Do the research)
· Find a credible scholarly or government resource published within the past 5 years that provides you with at least two facts (ex. costs, morbidity, mortality, safety, or other related statistics) for why your clinical problem is important (provide statistics). (The internet is a great place to get this information…just don’t forget to cite this information and add it to your reference page). If you find that your reference is the name of a webpage with n.d. instead of a date, then it is very questionable whether or not this is truly a scholarly source.
· Find a clinical practice guideline that relates to your question. It must have information that relates to the role of the nurse. Use the most recent clinical practice guideline version, preferably published within the past five years. (It is true that guidelines are not always updated within 5 years so you will need to discuss this.) If you do use a guideline that is published over 5 years ago you will need to discuss the matter with your instructor before submitting the paper. There are several websites listed in your textbook that can help with searching for guidelines. The UTA library also has resources for clinical practice guidelines.
· Find a research based article published within the last five years from a discipline other than nursing (medicine, social work, physical therapy, etc.) The article must support at least three statements that are relevant to your question and to nursing practice.
·
Hint:
Did you notice that you will be finding a total of
four
different sources
of information for your PICO question? To re-cap, these four sources are:
· Statistics you are reporting in paragraph one.
· Nursing quantitative research article for paragraphs 2, 3, and 4
· Clinical Practice Guideline (paragraph 5)
· An other-discipline article (paragraph 6)
·
Step Five: Write up your findings in APA format and submit them to assignment portal by the due date and time listed in your syllabus. Here’s how to write up your findings:
· Start with a 7th edition APA cover page. An example is provided by the instructor.
· Paragraph #1: Do not use a heading for this paragraph. Instead, put the title (the same way as it appeared in the cover page) at the top of the page, centered and in bold font. This is your opening paragraph. Start with an introduction statement. What is your PICO question? Describe why was it important (share the dollars, morbidity / mortality, statistics, safety stats you found with citation)? Your source for this paragraph should be a scholarly paper that is not one of your sources for the other paragraphs or a credible website. If you use a website and do not have a pdf file to submit for your source for this paragraph then you should include a working weblink in the paragraph that takes the reader directly to the website you used. You must include proper APA citations as well as the weblink.
· Use the following headings for paragraphs 2 through 7: Summary of Research Article, Major Variables, Strengths and Weaknesses, Practice Guideline, Fourth Resource, Conclusion. All headings for this paper are APA level 1 headings.
· Paragraph #2: What did your nursing quantitative research article add to your knowledge on this topic? State the design using one of these terms: descriptive, correlational, predictive correlational, experimental, or quasi-experimental. State the sampling method, and setting of the study (this should only take one sentence: e.g. “Smith and Johnson conducted a predictive correlational study using a convenience sample from a psychiatric outpatient clinic.”). State the major findings of the study (2 or 3 findings). The findings you share should come from the results or discussion settings and should be relevant to your PICO question and your practice as a nurse. (Hint: major findings are findings that are related to the study’s problem and purpose. For example, findings such as that a majority of the study was within a certain age group are not major findings).
· Paragraph #3. Mention the research variables in your article. Do not include demographic variables unless they are important to the results of the study. Give the variables meaningful names. For example, do not say the variable was GDS score. Say the variable was depression (it was measured by GDS score, and GDS score was the operational definition). If the study includes independent and dependent variables, mention which ones are independent or dependent. For each major variable, give a conceptual and operational definition. If the authors gave a conceptual definition for a variable, you may quote it with proper citation (this is the only place in this paper that direct quotations are allowed). Proper citation for direct quotes means that you give a page or paragraph number in addtion to the author and year. If you cannot find a conceptual definition for a variable you must infer a conceptual definition for the variable based on your understanding of the article. Authors do not usually state operational definitions, but you can tell what the operational definition was for each variable by what they describe about how the variables were measured. Give the level of measurement for each variable (nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio).
· Paragraph #4: Using the skills you have learned in your critique of a research article, describe two strengths or two weaknesses (or one strength and one weakness) that you found as you read this article.
Go back to what you learned in your article critique about sampling methods, measurement methods (ex. questionnaires), and data collection (how did they collect the data to make sure you are being thorough in your assessment). Be specific, so that your instructor, if reading the article, can find them too. Do not re-state the limitations provided by the authors of your study unless they have to do with the study’s sampling, measurement methods, or data collection. Do not discuss the research design or the descriptive or inferential statistics used by the authors as a strength or weakness of the study, as this is not related to with the study’s sampling, measurement methods, or data collection. (Hint: be sure to describe strengths or weaknesses of the study itself, not strengths or weaknesses of the article).
· Paragraph #5: What is the name of the clinical practice guideline that you found? Put the name in quotation marks. Give an APA citation for the guideline. Which organization sponsored the guideline? Share at least three facts that you found within the guideline that are relevant to the PICO question and your practice as a BSN nurse and cite the guideline appropriately. Make sure that the source you are using is actually a clinical practice guideline. Clinical practice guidelines are generally written by interdisciplinary teams and offer evidence based advice to professionals. Do not use sources that offer advice to patients or the general public or sources that offer advice without discussing the evidence behind their recommendations. If you have trouble finding a guideline discuss the matter with your coach or instructor prior to Wednesday of the week the assignment is due.
· Paragraph #6: Identify the other discipline article that you found. The article needs to be research based, but it does not have to be a research article itself. For example, it could be a systematic review. Qualitative and mixed methods studies can also be used for this source. It must have facts related to your practice question. Share at least three facts that you found within this source that are relevant to the PICO question and your practice as a nurse, and cite appropriately.
· Paragraph #7: re-state your PICO question and briefly summarize what you have learned through your search. Discuss whether your question was completely answered or not. What would you recommend, if anything, as a change in practice for nurses? Why? Remember, this is your closing paragraph(s). This paragraph should include information from each of your sources. Therefore you should also cite all of your sources in this paragraph. Also be sure to include recommendations for practice based on what you learned from your four sources.
· Note to students about writing up your findings:
· This is a formal APA paper. Do not use first or second person language in this paper. Points will be taken off if you do. Look at the Rubric for more APA information for this paper. APA points will be taken off for spelling, grammar, and usage errors.
· Your paper must be between five and seven pages (double spaced), not including the cover page and references.
· Turn your paper (as a pdf document) and your source articles (in pdf format) to the assignment submission link in Module Four at the due date and time listed in your syllabus. If you included a working link to your practice guideline and/or your statistics source in the paragraphs that require them you do not need to include pdf of those things.
· No direct quotes are allowed in this paper. The only exception is that you may use direct quotes for conceptual definitions of variables. If you do use a direct quote in such circumstances it must be properly cited. Any other direct quotes will receive a point deduction.
· Possible points for this assignment: 100 points
©2017 UTA School of Nursing, Revised September 21, 2024 Page
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©2017 UTA School of Nursing, Revised September 21, 2024 Page
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