Nurse practitioner is a title granted to individuals with widely different training: from a short, continuing-education program to a 2-year program leading to a master’s degree. There is agreement...

Nurse practitioner is a title granted to individuals with widely different training: from a short, continuing-education program to a 2-year program leading to a master’s degree. There is agreement among nursing professionals that it would be good to narrow the applicability of the title so that it referred to a standard type of training. There are no data, however, to support the selection of any one type of training as better than another. Therefore, Glascock and coworkers* sought to determine if education (master’s vs. non-master’s) made a difference in the type or quantity of nursing activity engaged in by pediatric nurse practitioners. One of the things they measured was the total number of nursing-related assessment activities performed. Because the nurse practitioners who had master’s degrees also tended to have more experience, these investigators did a two-way analysis of variance to see if educational background influenced assessment activities, while controlling for the confounding factor of experience. They divided experience into two categories: those with 7 years experience or less and those with more than 7 years experience (the data are in Table D-24, Appendix D). Is there evidence that the number of nursing assessment activities depends on the level of education?

Table D-24