Purpose To test an interdisciplinary art-based educational program for beginning baccalaureate traditional and accelerated nursing students. Design Longitudinal study (Pretest–Posttest) of nursing students’ metacognitive awareness. Method As part of a first-semester foundations nursing course, all students participated in the Art of Nursing program consisting of three 90-minute sessions led by graduate Art Education students in a local fine arts museum. Before and after the program, subcomponents of critical thinking were assessed using the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI). Findings A total of 218 students (56 traditional, 162 accelerated) participated. Statistically significant improvement was observed on seven components of the MAI. Although significant increases were observed for Declarative ( p < .0001), Planning ( p < .0001), and Comprehension Monitoring ( p < .0001), the differences pre to post were of different magnitudes between the student groups, characterizing a large change in the traditional versus accelerated group. Conclusions Our results suggest that (1) nursing students’ metacognitive awareness benefits from the museum-based experience despite demographic and educational differences and (2) overall the accelerated student group has exhibited higher metacognitive awareness at baseline as compared with the traditional student group; however, both groups demonstrate significant growth in this area after experiencing an art-based program.

We describe a system for associating the user interface entities of an application with their underlying semantic objects. The associations are classified by arranging the user interface entities in a type lattice in an object-oriented fashion. The interactive behavior of the application is described by defining application operations in terms of methods on the types in the type lattice, This scheme replaces the usual "active region" interaction model, and allows application interfaces to be specified directly in terms of the objects of the application itself. We discuss the benefits of this system and some of the difficulties we encountered.

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