Institute:	University of South Australia
Discipline:	Nursing
Title:	Professional Nursing Inquiry: A case study of the Design and Development of Graduate Qualities in the Bachelor of Nursing
Year addressed:	1st Year
Phase:	Identifying Attributes and Learning Experiences
Generic Attributes:	- Life Long Learning - Critical & creative thinking - Internationalisation

Issues Revealed:

- The differences between Creative and Critical Thinking
- Developing a subject for external and online delivery requires more in-depth engagement with the aims, objectives , graduate qualities and teaching and learning processes and resources than usually occurs with the development of a subject for only internal delivery.
- Problem solving should be applied to generic situations that are familiar to students as they need the contextual knowledge of the problem to inform this process.
- Critical reflection. Critical and creative thinking need to be viewed in a holistic framework
- It was decided that lifelong learning and development of an international perspective represented more than a just a desirable personal attribute and was a necessity for professional nursing practice.
- It is important to get students to reflect on HOW they learn as much as WHAT they learn.

Actions Taken:

- The development team adopted an "Action Research" framework
- Three of the seven generic Graduate Qualities identified by the University of South Australia were focused on within the course.
- Each team member chose a graduate quality and analysed it in relation to the discipline of nursing. The resulting discussion critically defined each attribute.
- Indicators for each attribute were identified which related to the Learning Experiences that were to be developed (these relationships were detailed in the appendix of the report).
- Each subject was examined to establish it's aims and objectives and determine which Graduate Qualities applied to it.
- The team then applied the framework to a case study first year subject in the Bachelor of Nursing

Lessons Learned/ Reflections:

- There was a distinct advantage in the timing of the project coinciding with the recent development of the Bachelor of Nursing Curriculum (it was still only in outline form at the beginning of the project).
- It was thought that the thinking and mapping of the graduate qualities may not have occurred to the same extent as if the subject materials were only being developed for internal delivery instead of external.
- Defining the difference between critical and creative thinking was a difficult task.
- When developing the teaching/learning strategies it was difficult to separate them from subject assessment. Therefore, the teaching and learning strategies incorporated activities that assisted students to meet subject assessment requirements.
- The major limitation to this project has been the emphasis on only 3 of the 7 graduate qualities
- It was felt that in the early course subjects it was important that students were assisted to focus on knowledge and processes of critical thinking and problem solving rather than on the content of discipline knowledge- this has meant a change around in the order of the course subjects