Introduction: Nursing students often encounter stressful situations when navigating coursework, examinations, simulation activities, clinical rotations, and maintaining personal responsibilities. Background: Stress in certain circumstances can negatively impact the attainment of educational goals. Nursing educators must address academic stress by building curriculums that include strategies for enhancing well-being and self-care management. The prebrief in simulation-based learning (SBL) may be a platform for promoting holistic techniques like mindfulness to facilitate self-care management within academic settings and foster skill transfer to future clinical practice settings. Methods: This dissertation aimed to examine using SBL to promote self-care with mindfulness in prebrief. A scoping review (ScR) was conducted to review the knowledge about mindfulness in nursing education and SBL. A research study examined mindfulness in prebrief for improving perceived stress, mindfulness, and awareness. An idea for creating a holistic theoretical model for enhancing prebrief practice was explored. Results: The ScR indicated that mindfulness was used in nursing education and rarely in SBL. The study showed no significance with posttest scores after prebrief mindfulness activities. A proposed model was designed to promote self-care practice in prebrief using mindfulness. Discussion: The findings from this dissertation provide a foundation for exploring ways to implement self-care management, including mindfulness, starting with the SBL prebrief in the academic setting.

Despite decades of research, academic dishonesty remains a significant concern in nursing education. The connection of academic dishonesty to dishonest clinical practice presents a moral imperative for nurse researchers to find new facets of understanding these phenomena. Literature regarding moral disengagement in health care is minimal and is even less prevalent in the context of nursing education. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of moral disengagement on prelicensure nursing students’ tendencies to engage in academic dishonesty in their last or next to last semester of a nursing program. A correlational design via survey method was used. The Moral Disengagement Scale (MDS) and Academic Dishonesty Tendency Scale (ADTS) were reliable in this sample, with alpha coefficients of .90 (N = 251) and .86 (N = 242), respectively. Eighty-seven percent (87.2%, n = 219) of participants reported either agreeing or strongly agreeing with at least one item reflecting moral disengagement. Nearly 75% (74.9%, n = 181) reported agreeing with at least one item reflecting a tendency to engage in academic dishonesty, with an additional 44.6% (n = 108) strongly agreeing. A two-tailed single bivariate correlation revealed a strong, positive, statistically significant relationship between the MDS and ADTS, r (236) = .66, p < .001. The findings suggest that nurse educators must emphasize moral development and the students’ ownership of responsibility academically as well as during the provision of care. Due to the uniqueness of various nursing programs, more research is needed to understand the concept of moral disengagement and its influencing factors, outcomes, and interventions in various nursing student populations and the nursing profession.