Diagnosing nursing students’ errors in medication calculation: Designing a method based on the 4 Cs teaching model for analysing mathematical proficiency

A novel method is proposed for classification of errors in medication calculation. The classification method is based on the pedagogical 4 Cs model for teaching mathematics to nursing students. The method is examined by an experiment where nine test subjects assess a corpus of 90 calculation errors from hand-written exams. The assessments are classified by the k-means clustering algorithm. It is observed that typically a single consensus cluster of five test subjects is formed, and there is no opposition cluster consisting more than one subject. Thus, the error classification by the proposed method seems promising, and further statistical validation will be carried out in future studies using larger data sets. The article is concluded by discussion of realising the classification method as an artificial intelligent software agent that is integrated to the existing e-learning environment STACK.