Comparison the effect of two clinical teaching models on performance of nursing students in intensive care unit

Background: An important question of nursing trainers regarding clinical education is "why some students, in spite of good clinical education, are not able to perform nursing skills in suitable level?" An educational method to solve this problem is mastery learning. The aim of present study was to compare the effect of mastery learning and composed clinical teaching method on performance of nursing students in intensive care unit. Methods: In a quasi-experimental study with pretest–posttest design, fifty-one last-year nursing students participated and divided into experimental and control groups. After pretest, control groups educated with composed clinical teaching method and the experimental groups educated with mastery learning method for 9 clinical days. For assessment the performance of nursing students in selected clinical procedures four checklists was prepared. For statistic analysis Mann- Whitney and Wilcoxon tests was used via SPSS software. Results: In comparison the pretest-posttest differences of two groups, the average score of experimental groups in all procedures was further than control groups (p = 0.001). Also, in the end of clinical education many of experimental students reached to mastery level, but, few students in control groups reached to mastery level. Conclusion: Due to significant effect of mastery learning method on clinical performance of nursing students, we suggest that nursing trainers use this method as a basic clinical teaching method especially to educate fundamental nursing skills.