Excellence in academic and practical skills is the main goal of most nursing educators. It is a tool to measure the level of success of the nurse educators. Concept mapping care plan is related to the expectation that today's nursing students must master a constantly expanding body of knowledge and apply complex skills in rapidly changing environment. Concept mapping care plan was developed by researcher and validated by ten expert panels using three rounds of Delphi technique. It was used to evaluate academic performance of nursing students at clinical practice. Concept mapping care plan is a good assessment tool to nursing educators to prepare nursing students for better critical thinking and expected to function effectively after graduation. The goal of concept mapping care plan as a teaching strategy during the clinical practices, help the students to integrate the knowledge from theory and implementing this knowledge in the clinical setting. Researcher believes that concept mapping care plan can be as a replacement of nursing process that have been practiced before in the clinical setting. In addition, through concept mapping care plan provides an opportunity for students to broaden their knowledge and become more creative.
The major component in nursing education is attachmnet at clinical practices to give the students experience,
responsibility and understanding in care of the patient. Nurse educators and the clinical nurse instructors are
responsible for coordinating the education of nursing students in clinical area. Currently practice using nursing
processes is more familiar to compare than concept mapping care plan among the nurses and nursing students.
Nursing care plan or nursing process has been utilized at the clinical setting to assess the actual and potential
health problems of the patients. However, the format of nursing care plans makes challenging to the students,
especially for new students in semester one to gather the information based on patients problems. In addition,
this nursing process evaluation is one of examination tools for them in running assessments. Therefore, the
development of concept mapping care plan at clinical practices was used to evalaute the students academic
achievement in clinical pratices. Concept mapping care plan was found to enhance the knowledge and
understanding of the nursing students and also improving the quality of clinical education. Nursing students
who have good skills will perform certain procedures better than students having fewer skills. This affects the
quality of work in the future as either a higher quality or of poor quality.