SON professor's fables improve learning

"Students have heard that nursing research is terribly important, though they don't always understand why. They expect the subject to be difficult and boring," said Grace, an associate professor of nursing and a women's health nurse practitioner. "In teaching the course, I try to engage them by keeping them amused."

When Grace teaches about quantitative data values, for example, she introduces the concept of level of measurement: Values of a variable can have names (categorical), ranks (ordinal), or specific numeric units of measurement (interval/ratio). She reinforces the differences with a revised story of Goldilocks.

In "Goldilocks and the Three Levels of Data," Goldilocks's choice of soup to eat is based on the level of measurement possible for the contents, rather than the temperature of the soup. The first soup, a broth filled with identical-sized cubes of various vegetables and fruit, was "too categorical." The second soup--containing small, medium, and large pieces of tofu--was "too ordinal." But the third soup, filled with a variety of sizes of potato pieces--all of which were multiples of the smallest in size--was "interval" and thus, just right for Goldilocks's favorite analytic strategies.

"Because people learn in a variety of ways, you never know which approach is going to trigger the 'ah-ha' experience for students," said Grace. "I use a smorgasbord of learning methods--the course textbook, my fables, multiple practice quizzes, play-acting--whatever helps them comprehend and retain the concepts better."

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