%0 Journal Article
%T Learning to Notice before Learning to Intervene: A Theoretical Framework for Developing Perceptual Expertise and Contextual Symptom Interpretation in Undergraduate Palliative Nursing Education
%A Oliver Hayes
%A Claire Whitmore
%A Emma Wilson
%A James Aldridge
%J Journal of Integrative Nursing and Palliative Care
%@ 3006-5550
%D 2026
%V 7
%N 2
%R 10.51847/MKKyjJuYME
%P 30-38
%X To develop an educational theory explaining how undergraduate nursing students may learn to notice clinically meaningful cues, interpret them in patient-specific context, and select proportionate responses in palliative care without reducing clinical judgment to factual recall or an unvalidated developmental scale. Original non-empirical educational theory informed by critically selected nursing-education, clinical-reasoning, palliative-care and assessment scholarship. Peer-reviewed literature published from 2017 to 2024 was used to examine clinical noticing, situation awareness, contextual interpretation, palliative and end-of-life learning, simulation, reflective debriefing and clinical-judgment assessment. Evidence was interpreted according to the type of claim each source could support rather than treated as a systematic-review corpus. Perceptual expertise is conceptualized as a recursive educational capacity involving five distinguishable functions: noticing, cue contextualization, interpretation, action selection and reflective calibration. Their relationship is conditional rather than a validated sequence of proficiency levels. Patient trajectory, preferences, relational circumstances, learner history, emotional salience and uncertainty can change what a cue means and how urgently action is warranted. Reflection becomes educationally valuable when it recalibrates subsequent perception and interpretation. Undergraduate palliative nursing education should make interpretation itself an explicit object of learning. Students need repeated, supervised opportunities to distinguish seeing a cue from understanding its significance, to tolerate uncertainty without unnecessary delay, and to revise judgment when patient context changes.
%U https://journalinpc.com/article/learning-to-notice-before-learning-to-intervene-a-theoretical-framework-for-developing-perceptual-e-97i5uiltoiyfry6