Nursing Students' Conceptions of Dimensional Analysis for Calculating Medication Dosage

Open Access
- Author:
- Ozimek, Daniel
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 23, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Gwen Lloyd, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Andrea Mccloskey, Major Field Member
Fran Arbaugh, Major Field Member
Andrew Belmonte, Outside Unit & Field Member
Kimberly Anne Powell, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- mathematical conception
dimensional analysis
dosage calculation
mathematics in nursing
mathematical concept
factor-label method
unit-factor method
conversions
math education
nursing education - Abstract:
- This study examines how nursing students think about and make sense of dimensional analysis, a common mathematical procedure for calculating medication dosage (Curren, 2010; Greenfield et al., 2006). Participants in this study include ten pre-licensure nursing students from a small, private health sciences college located in the northeastern United States. Data were collected in two phases: (1) asynchronously through e-mail, and (2) 60-minute semi-structured, task-based interviews held through Zoom. In each of these phases, the participating students used dimensional analysis to complete intentionally designed dosage calculation tasks. Students’ submitted work, and their actions and statements during the task-based interview, were analyzed using a hybrid coding scheme (Miles et al., 2020). Analytic memos were created to capture researcher reflections and facilitate the synthesis of overarching themes in the data (Maxwell, 2013). Drawing upon a recent specification of mathematical conception as a researcher-constructed model (Simon, 2017), nine distinct conceptions of dimensional analysis emerged from the data, including those relating to how the nursing students completed dosage calculations with dimensional analysis, why they chose to use dimensional analysis to calculate dosage, and the proportional reasoning strategies they used to support their completed dimensional analysis work. The results indicate that nursing students may utilize different approaches of dimensional analysis to complete dosage tasks, with some illustrating a more-flexible perspective on dimensional analysis. The students in this study also employed a variety of proportional reasoning strategies to make sense of their completed dimensional analysis work. These results contribute to the literature by offering novel insights into how and why nursing students utilize dimensional analysis. The nine conceptions developed in this study offer an empirically-grounded starting point for conceptualizing and articulating the ways in which nursing students make sense of and understand dimensional analysis as a method for calculating medication dosage.