Pedagogical and teaching strategies used to teach writing to pre-licensure students enrolled in health professional programs: a scoping review protocol.

Objective: The objective of this review is to map the existing literature on pedagogical approaches and teaching strategies used to teach academic and professional writing to pre-licensure students who are enrolled in health professional programs.

Introduction: Health professional programs are intended to develop competence in both academic and professional writing. Effective academic writing skills prompt critical reflection and engagement with research communities, while professional writing skills are used to document interventions and communicate across health systems. Despite the importance of these 2 forms of writing, there are ongoing concerns that practitioners are entering practice without adequate writing skills. Given these concerns and the importance of writing across health disciplines, there is value in identifying the pedagogical strategies and approaches used in health professional programs to develop writing skills and to transfer such skills from one communicative context to another.

Inclusion criteria: This review will consider research on the pedagogical approaches and teaching strategies used to teach academic and professional writing in pre-licensure health professional programs.

Methods: This review will be conducted in line with the JBI methodology for scoping reviews. The search strategy will aim to locate published literature using MEDLINE (Ovid), Embase, CINAHL with Full-Text (EBSCOhost), ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health (ProQuest), and ERIC (EBSCOhost), along with gray literature (using databases/search engines). Papers published from 2010 onward in English and in French will be included. Extracted data will be reported in tabular format and presented narratively to address each review objective.

Details of the review can be found in open science framework: http://osf.io/9raxp.