Evaluation of nursing students about learning with clinical simulation

Objective: to describe the contributions of clinical simulation for learning cognitive and procedural attributes through debriefing, from the perspective of nursing students. Method: descriptive exploratory study. Twenty nursing undergraduate students from a university in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo participated in this study. Data collection was performed at the debriefing stage. Student's perceptions about the simulation, positive aspects and what they could have done differently were registered. The students' statements were grouped according to the central themes and the framework of Bardin's content analysis (2011) and were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: enhancement of active, critical and reflective learning (47.5%) was identified due to the closeness to reality in nursing care (20.3%), manifestation of feelings experienced during the simulation (15.3%) and composition of the scenario (15.3%). Conclusion: the clinical simulation followed by debriefing promotes the understanding of the link between action and achievements in learning.