Engaging Strategies for bringing assessment to life

I'm Catherine Stephen from the School of Nursing, and I coordinate SNUG 107 Primary Healthcare. SNUG107 is run in the first year, first semester. So it's the first introduction that students would have to what is known as primary healthcare.

So the aim of this subject covers the broad aims and philosophical principles of primary healthcare; but it also takes a deep dive into the nurses' roles and responsibilities in providing that type of care in the community. It's a big cohort in that we had over — it was 670 students over 6 campuses. So we've got a diverse mix of rural, regional, remote, and also metro. So those students in their own little geographic locations have very different experiences. So the way that they're going to approach a case study or patient data is really going to be influenced by what they know and what they understand in terms of health and wellness. So again, this really aimed to kind of target those students and their unique experiences, and also through a lens of the social determinants of health. So where you've got very diverse patient experiences, you've also got diverse student experiences.

So this again, was an opportunity for a large cohort to really bring a section of themselves or a piece of themselves to this assessment task. This task that I'm talking about today really fits into a suite of assessment tasks that mirror the activities of general practice nursing in primary care. So we decided to make the option of creating a gen AI general practice, which was Highfield Road, and all the assessment tasks were set inside this location. So it mirrored typical nursing activity within this speciality.

For example, the first assessment was a group project that was aimed at like an in-service, also known as kind of like a tool talk, where the student nurses were going to educate their fellow multidisciplinary team on the SDGs. The second assessment task was a case study approach, and then the third and final one was about a health campaign directed specifically at that individual patient that they have selected and look at their issues from a social determinants lens. So really those three assessment tasks were as close as we could get to doing the broad spectrum of what general practice nurses do in general practice.

So we implemented last session an AI generative activity called "Who do you See?" It was designed to get students to think about patient data in the form of a case study and actually bring that data to life through using generative AI to create the actual person that they saw in their mind's eye. We gave students an opportunity and some time to actually read the patient data, come up with their selection, because they had four to choose from.

Now, all of these four case studies really did have quite nuanced, both explicit and hidden social determinants of health issues within them. So it became the student's job to really engage with these case studies and select one. Once they selected one person, then it was the opportunity to create the generative AI image, and from that image creation, that was the springboard for them to prepare for their interactive oral; which is similar to what we're doing here now - you're asking me questions about the topic, I'm trying my best to answer them and to display a little bit of my understanding about this. That was what the students were doing. We asked them three questions on their chosen case study. So together with their image and what they knew about the case study and their understanding, they would provide a little bit of critical analysis about the health concerns of the participant identifying the social health determinants behind the story, and then also coming up with strategies to best tackle the issues that were addressed in the case study.

So it was a real essential and quite a creative process for them to engage with their second assessment task; and it really helped them, to prepare some of the answers that we got in the viva voce were directly related to their image, in terms of one student said when we were looking at the 19-year-old who was in a situation of, at risk of homelessness, food insecurity, social isolation; one student said: "I could see that person staring back at me when I made my image." So it was a real, valuable way of creating those connections that ordinarily when we're trying to do case studies or case stories we sometimes miss. So, again, it was a great preparative step for them to be able to go into their interactive orals and really talk about that case study with some authenticity.

So in terms of them creating their AI image, we did give some instructions in terms of how they would be able to use the system, which was Padlet, that we elected. That made it very fair and equal for all participants and all students to be able to use, because you don't have to go offside or offsite to do it. Originally, before the plugin became available for Padlet, we were using outside providers such as DALL-E or DaVinci - with mixed results.

So in terms of instructing the students on their ability to construct their ideas and why they were doing it, we did have a couple of informative videos to begin with, prior to the task to show, this is actually how you select the creative AI part of Padlet.

And then also in terms of thinking about your prompts, what is it that you see without bias, without kind of predetermination and just using the case study and the salient points of the case study; how are you going to engineer that prompt? And really and truly, the students were guided by their own ideas, preconceptions and stigma before actually entering their prompts and that's why we had such varying results.

I think now more than ever, as educators, we've got opportunities to use these tools. And Padlet is something that is so simple to just connect to your Moodle site. And what I really enjoy about Padlet is the user experience. It's so simple for the students to operate and you can trial it yourself. You can have a Padlet, and then you can switch onto your student mode and just see what that looks like for a student coming into your site. And then you can understand how simple it is and creative it can be.

But I am a bit of a, a Padlet convert. There are issues in terms of it, when it's high traffic and high volume, it can lag a little bit. But as a tool, it really helps the students to explore ideas either creatively or in text, in, in quite a non-judgmental way. It's great to use in class too. Often when we do activities such as the gen AI image creation, we actually use that in tutorial to actually have open discussions on. And what's great is you can set the settings for students to go and engage with other students' work if that's something that helps with whatever activity you're doing.

When you talk to a student nurse in first year, and you describe to them that they have agency, that they have license to innovate, it really is, it's very inspiring. Like, we've got goosebumps thinking about it, because they're obviously the future, and in a session where we would do gen AI image creation, after that I'd be, you know, kind of like going around the room, we'd be talking, but I felt that this was more of a respectful hands-off learning experience for the students. Particularly, they were the ones that were seeing the bias. I felt that I was more hands off. I would guide discussion, but it was just so, stimulating, it was informed, the discussion that they were coming out with, they were helping each other. And it really made me think that they were building in confidence. As they built in their confidence with AI use, so did mine. And it almost made me a little bit more bold to trial and to take that trial spirit into my research. So if, if anything, I'm more grateful for the students who participated in this experiment, as it were, because it's inspired me to look at AI use and how we can best use that as a tool to help people to self-manage chronic conditions. So it's come full circle. Yeah, and I'm grateful to the students to be able to show me that too.