Evidence Based Teaching Case Study

Evidence-Based Teaching

Patient Selection The patient chosen for this evidence-based (EBP) teaching exercise C.S., a fifteen year-old Hispanic male who was recently diagnosed with type one diabetes two weeks ago. He presented to the clinic with his mother for follow up and blood sugar management. His mother explains that there are several people in their family with diabetes; however, he is the first to be diagnosed at such a young age. He verbalizes questions regarding diabetes and blood sugar management and his mother expresses fears and worries about her son’s future. During the visit, his vital signs were 118/65, 68, 14, 97.8, and 97% on room air. He denies frequent urination, increased thirst or hunger since last week. He has been taking his blood sugars four times daily and explains that by the evening, his sugar is 210 mg/dl. He doses himself with insulin and his sugar is down to 150 mg/dl prior to going to bed. He explains that since his diagnosis, he actually feels a lot better than he did in months prior to diagnosis. Today, we asked him to come to the clinic fasting, and his blood sugar was 101mg/dl. In a previous visit, C.S. and his mother were asked to write down questions and concerns as they arise and bring them to today’s visit to be explored.

The acronym VARK stands for visual, aural, read/write, and kinetic learning. It is a sensory model that accumulates a score based on learner preference (Sidhu, n.d.). It was stated that C.S. is a multimodal learner, meaning that he does not have one preferred learning mode. Instead, he benefits from several learning styles, putting the teacher in a unique position. This learner is best served with a variety of teaching modalities. In addition, he has many family members that are concerned and cannot speak English; therefore, several handouts within the teaching aid have links provided to read the information in