NURS 764 Week 2 Project: Topic, Bibliography and Objectives Example

Teaching the Golden Minute: Topic, Bibliography and Measurable Objectives for a Newborn Resuscitation Teaching Project in a Junior BSN Maternal-Newborn Course

The Topic and Why It Matters

This project teaches the golden minute. When a baby is born apneic, the nurse has about one minute to dry and warm the infant, clear the airway only if secretions block it, rub the back to stimulate a breath and, if none comes, start bag-mask ventilation. The American Heart Association guideline for neonatal resuscitation estimates that roughly one newborn in ten needs some help to begin breathing and identifies effective ventilation of the lungs as the priority in newborns who need resuscitation (Aziz et al., 2020). Most births in the United States are attended by nurses, and a nurse is often the first person at the warmer when a baby is born limp.

I chose this topic because of a gap I see each semester. Junior BSN students complete a skills lab on newborn resuscitation and pass a checklist, yet on the unit they often step back when a real baby needs help. The skill is short, high in stakes and rarely seen during a student rotation, which is exactly the kind of content that a single lecture and a single lab do not secure. It also fits every setting the course will ask me to plan for: a classroom, a clinical unit, an online community and, through the Helping Babies Breathe program used in many low-resource countries, a mission trip.

Learners and Setting

The learners are junior students in a traditional prelicensure BSN program, in the second semester of the junior year, enrolled in a seven-credit maternal-newborn course with four credits of theory and three of clinical practice. A typical cohort has about forty-eight students, most in their early twenties, with a handful of second-degree and military students, several students who learned English after another language and a few with documented accommodations. Their clinical rotations are on a labor and delivery unit, a mother-baby unit and a level II nursery at two community hospitals. Billings and Halstead (2016) describe the faculty task of matching content to learners' level and context, and these students have strong theory preparation but very little exposure to births, let alone resuscitations.

Measurable Objectives

By the end of the unit, junior BSN students will:

• 1. Score 80% or higher on a 20-item knowledge test covering preparation for birth, the initial steps, the decision to ventilate and the assessment of breathing and heart rate.
• 2. Complete the initial steps of drying, warming and stimulating, and evaluate breathing, within 30 seconds of birth in a simulated apneic newborn, as scored by faculty on a standard skills checklist.
• 3. Begin bag-mask ventilation with visible chest rise within 60 seconds of birth in the same simulation, on at least two of three attempts.
• 4. State their assigned resuscitation role and its first three actions during a structured debriefing, as recorded by the facilitator on a role checklist.
• 5. Achieve at least 80% on the skills checklist at an unannounced recheck six weeks after the unit.

The first objective addresses knowledge, the second and third the timed psychomotor skill, the fourth the role clarity that learner studies identify as missing, and the fifth retention, which the literature shows is where newborn resuscitation training most often fails.

Bibliography of Applicable Sources

Guidelines for the Clinical Content

Aziz et al. (2020) is the 2020 American Heart Association guideline for neonatal resuscitation, developed with neonatal experts, and it provides the clinical content that every part of this project must match: preparation, the initial steps, assessment of breathing and heart rate and the central place of ventilation. I will use it to write the knowledge test and the skills checklist so that what students learn agrees with what they will see on the unit.

What Learners Experience

Priyanti et al. (2026) interviewed twenty preregistration nursing students in Indonesia who had witnessed neonatal resuscitation in clinical units and described five themes, among them being overwhelmed, not knowing their role, an emotional burden that lingered and a gap between simulation and reality. This study is the reason for objective four and for the debriefing plan; it suggests that students need a defined place in the event, not only the steps.

Theory

Jeffries et al. (2015) summarize the NLN Jeffries Simulation Theory, in which context, background, design, the person facilitating and the learner each influence what happens in a simulation, which works best when learners do the work together, interact freely and feel trusted, and which produces outcomes at three levels: the participant, the patient and the system. The theory will guide scenario design and the order of outcomes I measure. Ericsson (2004) reviews evidence that expert performance in medicine develops through deliberate practice: focused, repeated attempts at well-defined tasks with immediate feedback, rather than experience alone. His argument supports short, repeated practice of the golden minute rather than one long simulation.

Teaching Methods with Evidence

Hunt et al. (2014) introduced rapid cycle deliberate practice in a pre-post study of pediatric residents managing a simulated cardiac arrest. Instead of one scenario and a long debriefing, the facilitator paused the scenario to correct errors and had learners try again. After the change, the pause before defibrillation fell from a median of 84 seconds to 8 seconds, and residents were more likely to start compressions within one minute. The golden minute is a short, timed sequence like the one they trained, so this method will be tested in my lab.

Stephen et al. (2026) compared a blended approach, a two-hour online session followed by two days of low-fidelity simulation using the Helping Babies Breathe curriculum, with reading materials alone among 128 medical and nursing interns in Tanzania. Knowledge and skill scores improved significantly more in the blended group, and the gains were still present at six weeks. Their design supports pairing online preparation with hands-on practice, which I will use in the classroom plan.

Campos et al. (2026) described a quality improvement project in which undergraduate nursing students in South India completed an asynchronous maternal-fetal course and then a simulated neonatal resuscitation escape room. Most groups completed the resuscitation sequence with little help, scores on the infant distress portion of the posttest rose, and students reported better teamwork. The project gives me a tested model for an innovative strategy and a caution that it was descriptive, not controlled.

Retention of Skills

Sendo et al. (2025) followed Ethiopian midwives who had completed Helping Babies Breathe during their final pre-service year. A year later, the median knowledge score had fallen from 98% to 74%, and the share showing proficiency on the skills examination had fallen from 62% to 36%. Kalabamu et al. (2026) studied 226 providers in two Tanzanian regions who had access to in situ, self-directed practice on simulators; mean skills scores fell from 92.5% to 82.3% over a year, though 77% retained the skill. Together they show that even strong initial training fades and that frequent, brief practice slows the loss, which is why objective five measures retention and why the clinical plan will include short practice sessions.

Limits of the Evidence

The bibliography has gaps I will keep in view. Only two of the studies involved prelicensure nursing students, and one of those described students' experiences without testing a method. Most of the teaching and retention research comes from midwives, interns and providers in Tanzania, Ethiopia and India, who practice resuscitation far more often than an American junior student will. Rapid cycle deliberate practice was tested with pediatric residents on cardiac arrest, not with nursing students on newborns, and the escape room project had no comparison group. These limits do not cancel the evidence, but they mean the project should measure its own results rather than assume that methods proven elsewhere will work here. For that reason, each objective has a defined assessment, and the clinical plan will compare skills checklist scores before and after the practice sessions.

How the Sources Shape the Project

The sources point in one direction. The guideline sets the content, the learner study shows that role and emotion matter as much as steps, the theories call for experience followed by reflection and for repeated practice with feedback, the teaching studies offer methods that have worked with similar learners, and the retention studies warn that whatever is gained will fade without practice. The objectives therefore measure not only whether students can perform the golden minute once, but whether they know where to stand and can still do it six weeks later. The classroom, clinical and online plans that follow will each be judged against these five objectives.

References

Aziz, K., Lee, H. C., Escobedo, M. B., Hoover, A. V., Kamath-Rayne, B. D., Kapadia, V. S., Magid, D. J., Niermeyer, S., Schmölzer, G. M., Szyld, E., Weiner, G. M., Wyckoff, M. H., Yamada, N. K., & Zaichkin, J. (2020). Part 5: Neonatal resuscitation: 2020 American Heart Association guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and emergency cardiovascular care. Circulation, 142(16 Suppl. 2), S524-S550. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000902

Billings, D. M., & Halstead, J. A. (2016). Teaching in nursing: A guide for faculty (5th ed.). Elsevier.

Campos, E. M., Dambrino, K. L., Sternberg, J., McCoy, T., Garner, S. L., Natt, K., Prater, L. S., Ke, W., Lourduswamy, L., Victor, S., Kirubha, V., Hallmark, B., & Honey, J. (2026). Launching a neonatal resuscitation escape room to combat high infant mortality rates: A quality improvement project. Advances in Neonatal Care, 26(3), 247-254. https://doi.org/10.1097/ANC.0000000000001356

Ericsson, K. A. (2004). Deliberate practice and the acquisition and maintenance of expert performance in medicine and related domains. Academic Medicine, 79(10 Suppl.), S70-S81. https://doi.org/10.1097/00001888-200410001-00022

Hunt, E. A., Duval-Arnould, J. M., Nelson-McMillan, K. L., Bradshaw, J. H., Diener-West, M., Perretta, J. S., & Shilkofski, N. A. (2014). Pediatric resident resuscitation skills improve after "rapid cycle deliberate practice" training. Resuscitation, 85(7), 945-951. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resuscitation.2014.02.025

Jeffries, P. R., Rodgers, B., & Adamson, K. (2015). NLN Jeffries simulation theory: Brief narrative description. Nursing Education Perspectives, 36(5), 292-293. https://doi.org/10.5480/1536-5026-36.5.292

Kalabamu, F. S., Daudi, V., Moshiro, R., Kamala, B., Mdoe, P., Bishanga, D., Kvaløy, J. T., Ersdal, H., & Mpembeni, R. (2026). Neonatal resuscitation skills retention among healthcare providers one year after implementation of in situ low-dose high-frequency simulations using innovative tools across two regions in Tanzania. Global Health Action, 19(1), Article 2639774. https://doi.org/10.1080/16549716.2026.2639774

Priyanti, R. P., Hidayah, N., Asri, A., Dianita, E. M., Lin, S. C., & Tonapa, S. I. (2026). The lived experience of nursing students witnessing neonatal resuscitation in Indonesia: A phenomenological study. Journal of Hospice & Palliative Nursing. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1097/NJH.0000000000001255

Sendo, E. G., Aga, F., & Gebrewold, L. A. (2025). Retention of knowledge and skills among midwives one year after completing helping babies breathe pre-service training in Ethiopia: A non-randomized quasi-experimental study. Maternal Health, Neonatology and Perinatology, 11(1), Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40748-025-00201-2

Stephen, A., Joho, A. A., & Bankanie, V. (2026). Impact of interprofessional blended learning with low-fidelity simulation on neonatal resuscitation skills among interns: A quasi-experimental study in Tanzania. Advances in Simulation, 11(1), Article 59. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41077-026-00451-w