Abstract
Teaching leadership skills for the modern healthcare environment can be challenging. Nurse educators must plan for unforeseen changes in future healthcare environments, which are increasingly placing nurses in positions to lead interdisciplinary teams and solve complex problems related to quality and outcomes of health services. To prepare students for this challenge, nursing educators must find effective ways to teach leadership skills to future nurses. The challenge, however, is that there appears to be as many ideas about how to teach leadership as there are concepts about the nature of what leadership is. In the following study, undergraduate nursing students participated in a quasi-experimental, posttest-only survey that tested leadership outcomes following experiences in service learning and lecture-based activities. This survey compared leadership gains following these two learning methods and found compelling evidence to support the conclusion that service learning can produce greater gains in leadership when compared with classroom lecture.|Keywords: Active learning, passive learning, service learning, lecture