Dr. Sally Blowers

Associate Professor Dr. Sally Blowers has been with the College of Nursing for eleven years.  She teaches Nursing Foundations, and Master’s and Doctoral-level Nursing Education classes.  Currently, Dr. Blowers is working on three research projects, all of which highlight her interest in Nursing education.  One project is quantitative in nature, and it examines connections between her Foundations’ comprehensive final exam and student success on later tests (specifically, the mid-curricular exam, the exit exam, and the NCLEX).  She is still organizing data on this project, but preliminary conclusions support the idea that there is a connection between success on the Foundations’ exam and later critical assessment.    This conclusion suggests that it is possible to identify at-risk students earlier than was previously thought.  Dr. Blowers is also currently doing qualitative research on student-testing errors on application-type exams.   She has no definite conclusions at this time, but she notes that there are myriad student errors to study.   The third project Dr. Blowers is working on concerns the contribution that peer tutors make to student learning.  In July, she will present her research the 18^th Sigma Theta Tau International Nursing Research Congress in Vienna, Austria.   Since its inception the peer-tutoring program at ETSU CON has proven helpful to students.  Dr. Blowers intends to do future research on peer-tutoring, with an eye towards formalizing the role of the peer-tutor and studying in more detail what peer-tutoring can really do to help at-risk students. 

            Dr. Blowers plans to publish some of her research in either the Journal of Nursing Education or Nurse Educator, and she will submit her peer-tutoring article to the Peer Tutoring Journal.  For more information on Dr. Blowers’ research interests please contact her at blowers@etsu.edu. 

Publications & Presentations

2007 October. The Case for Peer Teaching: Implications for Nursing Education. Presented at the Fifth Annual Faculty Research Forum.