NAPNAP Position Statement on Age Parameters DQ

As a future advanced practice nurse, it is important that you are able to connect your didactic experience to your Practicum experience. By applying the concepts you study in the classroom to clinical settings, you better prepare yourself for your future professional career. Each week, you complete an assignment that prompts you to reflect on your Practicum experiences and relate them to the material presented in the classroom.

To prepare for this course’s Practicum experience, address the following in your Practicum journal:

Explain what most excites and/or concerns you about pediatric clinical experiences. Include a description of your strengths and weaknesses in terms of working with children and how these strengths and weaknesses might impact your Practicum experience.
Select and explain a nursing theory to guide your practice with pediatric patients.
Based on your strengths, weaknesses, and theory of nursing practice, develop goals and objectives for the Practicum experience in this course. Be sure to consider the NAPNAP Position Statement on Age Parameters for Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Practice from this week’s Learning Resources.
Create a timeline of Practicum activities based on your Practicum requirements.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.