Woodend Clinical Education Research Grant

CASN is pleased to announce a new, annual $5,000 research grant called the “Woodend Clinical Education Research Grant”. The purpose is to fund a graduate student’s (master’s or doctoral) research project focusing on clinical practice education.

Dr. Kirsten Woodend states: “We have been using the same clinical education model pretty much back to Florence Nightingale. With the pressures to increase numbers of nursing students and increasing challenges in finding placements there’s a great need to explore the way we prepare registered nurses for practice, trialling new approaches and building a body of evidence to help guide us. It is my hope that this graduate student research grant will encourage the building of programs of research in this area.”

Research Funding

Funds for this grant are provided by the Woodend Clinical Education Research Grant

Grant Details

Grants available: 1 per calendar year
Funding: up to $5,000
Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2024
Start of funding date: July 1, 2024
Applications can be either in French or English

Eligibility Criteria

The applicant must be a graduate student (master’s or doctoral) enrolled in a program at a CASN member school.
If the Principal or Co-investigator received the grant, they must wait 3 years before being eligible to receive another grant.
The successful applicant must agree to sign a research agreement.
The research must address clinical education research that involves students or faculty directly while they are in the nursing education program.
The application is 10 pages maximum, excluding required attachments, using an 11-point font and maintaining the margins as they appear on the application form.
All documents must be in one PDF with a maximum size of 45 MB.
Submissions must include all requested information.

How to Apply

All applications and supporting documentation must be submitted to Don Flaming, Senior Education Coordinator, via email (dflaming@casn.ca).

CASN Woodend Clinical Education Research Grant Winners

VJ Gibbins, 2023 Woodend Clinical Education Research Grant recipient

CASN is pleased to announce that the 2023 Woodend Clinical Education Grant recipient is VJ Gibbins.

I am very proud to be a Registered Nurse, a PhD Candidate, and an Associate Teaching Professor of Nursing at the University of Alberta! I joined the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta fulltime in January 2013. I have taught in clinical, lab, simulation, and both small and large lectures. My first nursing role, however, was as a summer camp nurse in Maine, USA. Camp came to be part of me and who I developed into, celebrating my 25th summer (over 26 years) this past August! My husband is also a nurse and we got married at camp and together with our 14 year old daughter, return to camp each summer.

Learning through play is a cornerstone of the summer camp experience and a tenet of my teaching and learning philosophy which propelled me to undertake doctoral studies at the University of Alberta. My research interests lay in how we learn to become nurses. My doctoral research project is titled Exploring Undergraduate Nursing Students’ Experience of Clinical Course Failure Through the Lens of Achievement Motivation. Underpinning this project is my belief that discourse about why students struggle and fail in clinical wrongly focuses on knowledge deficits and weak skill performance. An assumption I make is that all students come to clinical with the same theoretical and practical preparation. Certainly there are students who come without appropriate preparation or skill practice, but that is part of what clinical is intended for – to learn how to put those pieces together in practice. So why are some students unable to do so? This project aims to investigate if there are common motivational beliefs among students who struggle or fail in their clinical learning. Motivational theories are more complex than simple carrot and stick conceptualizations of internal and external motivations. How we perceive ourselves as learners, our abilitty to learn, what constitutes learning, and what it means to our self-esteem and self-identity when we realize we have a learning need are, in my belief, the largely unaddressed components of the learning process in clinical nursing education. Understanding if or how these components contribute to clinical learning outcomes is a first step towards developing targeted interventions that may remove barriers to success for those at-risk students.

I am very grateful to have received the inaugural CASN Woodend Clinical Education Research Grant. This grant will help me interview nursing students from across Canada who have struggled in or failed their nursing clinical courses. Achievement motivation research is typically quantitative in nature. My study is a first to include current nursing students who are actively experiencing the consequences of their struggling or failure experiences. It is also a first to analyze these experiences qualitatively through the lens of achievement motivation assessing for elements of mindsets, goal types, expectancy value, attributions, emotions, interests, and self-determination. I offer my thanks and sincere gratitude to the CASN Education Committee for their support and acknowledgement of the importance of this research.