Evidence for teaching: what are faculty using?

The benefit of engaging in evidence-based teaching practice (EBTP) is to identify and implement best practices in nursing education. Unfortunately, nursing education has made little forward movement in identifying the evidence upon which faculty base their teaching practices. A national online survey of 295 nurse educators from 86 programs revealed the evidence they use in their teaching practices as well as the facilitators and barriers to EBTP. The majority of participants indicated they used quantitative and qualitative research (94 percent) but also considered written course evaluations, conference information, class feedback, and student comments as evidence. Participants identified personal beliefs as the most frequent facilitator to EBTP with 25 percent indicating their institution as a barrier. As EBTP offers a guide to establishing best practices in nursing education, building a science of nursing education is the responsibility of all nurse educators.