Mothers' comprehension of terminology associated with the care of a newborn baby.

To determine mothers' level of comprehension of terminology used by health care providers when discussing the care of a newborn baby. Sixty patients on a postpartum unit in a general hospital who gave birth to healthy newborns were asked to define 56 terms related to the care of newborn babies that were commonly used by health care providers. Mothers' knowledge of terms was examined by level of education, number of children, previous experience caring for newborns, and age. Analyses of variance results revealed significant differences among mothers for age and level of education. Mothers who were 30 years or older and who had more than a high school education demonstrated the more overall knowledge of terms than younger mothers with less than a high school education. An individual needs assessment must be done for every mother who is a patient on a postpartum unit to determine their learning needs as well as their understanding of common terminology.

Curriculum evaluation.

Curriculum evaluation is an essential phase of curriculum development. Through evaluation a faculty discovers whether a curriculum is fulfilling its purpose and whether students are actually learning. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the implementation of a formative evaluation used by faculty members of a baccalaureate nursing program. PAIREDAR, a three phase generic model, was utilised to conduct this formative evaluation. The definition and description of this model are included. The process used by the evaluation team within the framework of the model is described in a step by step fashion. Faculty and student interview question sets and a sample course evaluation worksheet are presented.