Nursing Students' Transfer of Learning during a Disaster Tabletop Exercise

Disasters require nurses to make decisions. A tabletop exercise, used in disaster education, is a classroom activity for solving problems. Purpose The study purposes were to (1) describe, as scores, the transfer of learning from basic medical-surgical coursework to student decisions made during a disaster scenario tabletop exercise and (2) identify students' attitudes about their use of their previous learning during this experience. Method Researcher-designed instruments and a tabletop exercise were used to measure prelicensure students' transfer of select basic medical-surgical learning to their decisions during the exercise. Results Mean (SD) student scores during the tabletop exercise were as follows - Tabletop Matrix: infection, 17.61 (6.03); bleeding, 14.93 (5.36); pain, 11.17 (5.08); electrolyte, 13.73 (6.19); disaster knowledge: 19.46 (3.08); and attitudes: 51.41 (5.43). Conclusion During this tabletop exercise, students demonstrated transfer of learning.