Use of extraneous conversation in the teaching of nursing skills

The purpose of this study was to explore the use of extraneous conversation as a distractor while assessing students' level of skill acquisition in the laboratory. The sample consisted of 50 nursing students enrolled in Introduction to Nursing Methods at a large Midwestern university. Subjects were assigned randomly to experimental and control groups. Extraneous conversation was used as a distractor during skill demonstration of intramuscular injections by the 25 students in the experimental group. The 25 students in the control group were not verbally distracted during skill demonstration. These skill demonstrations were videotaped. Data were collected from three evaluations: during the skill demonstration, a rating was based on the inclusion of critical elements; later on viewing the video tapes, faculty assigned a score to the performance based on the number of elements included; students were re-evaluated in the clinical setting based on guidance given by the instructor, performance of critical and noncritical elements, and the smoothness of the performance. Analysis of data from the ratings of students in the laboratory and from the ratings of students from the video tapes with the Wilcoxon rank-sum test revealed no significant differences (a = .05) in performance for the experimental and control groups. Chi-square analysis of data from the evaluation in the clinical setting indicated that students in the experimental group performed at a higher level than students in the control group.