Enterprise AI Analysis
Empowering Nursing Students During AI Era: Educational Strategies for Enhancing Knowledge and Acceptance of Artificial Intelligence
This study demonstrates a highly effective, standardized 10-session blended curriculum designed to significantly boost undergraduate nursing students' AI knowledge and acceptance. By focusing on practical application and ethical considerations, the program successfully prepares future healthcare professionals for an AI-integrated future, driving substantial improvements in perceived usefulness and ease of use.
Executive Impact: Pioneering AI Literacy in Nursing
The future of healthcare demands an AI-literate workforce. This research provides a scalable and reproducible model for integrating AI education into nursing curricula, ensuring graduates are not just users, but critical evaluators and confident adopters of AI technologies. The program's success across a large cohort, irrespective of demographic factors, highlights its potential for widespread, equitable implementation.
Deep Analysis & Enterprise Applications
Select a topic to dive deeper, then explore the specific findings from the research, rebuilt as interactive, enterprise-focused modules.
Understanding AI in Nursing Education
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming healthcare, requiring nursing professionals to integrate AI tools into their practice. Undergraduate nursing students often lack sufficient AI literacy and express uncertainty about its safe and appropriate use. This study aimed to address this gap by evaluating a standardized 10-session blended curriculum designed to enhance AI knowledge and acceptance among nursing students, ensuring they are prepared for the evolving AI era.
The program focused on equipping students with foundational AI literacy, ethical guardrails, and practical skills. By improving perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) through concept scaffolding and hands-on demonstrations, the curriculum fostered a critical yet accepting stance toward AI. The findings strongly support a theory-consistent pathway where enhanced knowledge leads to greater acceptance and appropriate engagement with AI in learning and clinical tasks.
Robust Quasi-Experimental Design
This study employed a one-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design involving a stratified random sample of 1,000 undergraduate nursing students from the Faculty of Nursing, Sohag University, Egypt. Data were collected via a self-administered questionnaire at baseline and one month post-intervention.
Key Instruments: The AI Knowledge Scale (AIKS-16; 0–32) measured foundational AI literacy. The AI Acceptance Scale (AIA-34; 0–136), aligned with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), assessed Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU), and Attitude/Intention. Both scales demonstrated strong internal consistency (Cronbach's α ≥ 0.85) and underwent rigorous translation and cultural validation. Threats to internal validity were mitigated by a short exposure window, identical delivery across groups, and proctored assessments.
The intervention was a standardized 10-session blended curriculum, delivered in small groups, incorporating micro-lectures, case-based discussions, brief hands-on demonstrations, and guided ethical reflection. Each session was supported by a facilitator script and fidelity checklist.
Significant Gains and Strong Correlations
The curriculum resulted in substantial and equitable improvements across all measures:
- AI Knowledge: Increased significantly from an average of 15.01±4.72 to 30.33±3.11 (p<0.001), demonstrating a large effect size (Cohen's d ≈2.77). This represents a shift from roughly 47% to 94.8% of the maximum score.
- AI Acceptance: Rose dramatically from 67.02±13.47 to 122.33±9.21 (p<0.001), also with a large effect size (Cohen's d ≈3.11). This translates to an increase from approximately 49% to 89.9% of the maximum score.
- TAM Subdomains: All subdomains—Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and Attitude/Intention—showed significant gains, with PEOU registering the largest standardized change (d ≈2.99).
- Knowledge-Acceptance Correlation: Post-test knowledge was strongly correlated with acceptance (r=0.647, p<0.001), supporting the theoretical pathway that understanding fosters adoption.
- Equitable Impact: ANCOVA revealed no educationally meaningful differences in knowledge or acceptance gains by sex or residence after controlling for baseline scores, indicating uniform program effectiveness.
These results confirm that the blended curriculum effectively enhanced AI literacy and willingness to adopt AI tools among nursing students.
Future-Proofing Nursing with AI Literacy
This study provides a reproducible educational protocol for integrating AI literacy into nursing curricula, moving beyond mere exposure to fostering active, accountable, and ethically grounded engagement with AI. The findings underscore the importance of:
- Concept Scaffolding: Building strong foundational knowledge about AI, its capabilities, limitations, and ethical considerations.
- Guided, Low-Risk Practice: Offering hands-on experience with AI tools in simulated and study contexts to improve perceived ease of use.
- Explicit Ethical Guardrails: Teaching students about bias, data privacy, and the importance of disclosure and verification routines to promote responsible AI use.
- Faculty Development: Equipping instructors with the necessary knowledge and resources to teach AI effectively, using standardized materials and clear grading rubrics.
- Assessment Redesign: Shifting assessment from factual recall to applied judgment, evaluating students' ability to appraise AI outputs and articulate safe use boundaries.
By institutionalizing this model, nursing programs can prepare graduates not just to use AI, but to use it accountably, promoting safety, equity, and person-centred care in an AI-enabled healthcare landscape.
Enterprise Process Flow: Study Phases
| Measure | Pre-test Mean ± SD | Post-test Mean ± SD | Gain (Points) |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Knowledge (AIKS-16 total) | 15.01 ± 4.72 | 30.33 ± 3.11 | +15.32 |
| AI Acceptance (AIA-34 total) | 67.02 ± 13.47 | 122.33 ± 9.21 | +55.31 |
| Perceived Usefulness (PU) | 27.38 ± 7.19 | 51.79 ± 6.38 | +24.41 |
| Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) | 21.27 ± 6.81 | 43.12 ± 5.74 | +21.85 |
| Attitude/Intention | 18.37 ± 5.04 | 27.42 ± 4.18 | +9.05 |
Curriculum's Foundational Impact
The study concludes that a standardized, fidelity-checked blended AI curriculum successfully produced large and equitable gains in AI knowledge and acceptance among undergraduate nursing students. Framed by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), these results suggest that concept scaffolding, brief hands-on practice, and explicit disclosure/verification routines significantly strengthen perceived usefulness and ease of use, thereby supporting accountable AI adoption.
These findings provide compelling evidence that foundational AI competencies are teachable at scale, offering a robust model for educational institutions to prepare the next generation of nurses for an AI-integrated healthcare landscape, fostering calibrated trust and appropriate engagement with AI.
Calculate Your AI Adoption ROI
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Your AI Implementation Roadmap
Based on the demonstrated success, here's a high-level roadmap to integrate AI literacy into your organization and workforce.
Phase 1: Needs Assessment & Pilot
Conduct an internal assessment to identify current AI literacy gaps and specific departmental needs. Develop a pilot program with a small cohort, leveraging insights from this study's curriculum design, including concept scaffolding and hands-on practice, and adapting it to your organizational context.
Phase 2: Curriculum Standardization & Faculty Training
Standardize the AI education curriculum across relevant departments, ensuring consistent content delivery and assessment. Implement comprehensive training for internal educators (or "faculty") on AI fundamentals, ethical considerations, and effective teaching methodologies for AI tools.
Phase 3: Full-Scale Rollout & Integration
Deploy the standardized AI training across your workforce. Integrate AI competencies into job roles and performance evaluations. Establish clear guidelines for AI tool usage, promoting accountable adoption and ethical application in daily tasks and decision-making processes.
Phase 4: Continuous Evaluation & Advanced Development
Implement ongoing monitoring and evaluation of AI literacy, acceptance, and the impact on operational efficiency. Develop advanced modules for specialized AI applications relevant to different roles, ensuring your workforce stays ahead of emerging AI trends and capabilities.
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