Background Nurse educators have an obligation to ensure that students learn, develop, and apply higher-order cognitive skills. New graduates are expected to practice at a higher performance level in order to care for more complex patients, yet barriers to clinical education, such as securing clinical sites, have made it difficult for nurse educators to provide a variety of learning experiences. Many nursing faculty are either supplementing or replacing clinical experiences with simulation-based training with the goal of students transferring the knowledge and skills learned in the laboratory setting to the “real” patient care environment. Significance Debriefing has been recognized as the most significant component of a simulated learning experience (Shinnick, Woo, Horwich, & Steadman, 2011; Forneris, 2015). Little is known regarding the effectiveness of debriefing strategies, and so the evaluation of debriefing is critical to ensure learning outcomes and students’ transfer of learning. Specifically, the evaluation of the debriefer’s effectiveness in engaging students during a structured, theory-based debriefing is critical, as the practice of debriefing methods broadens throughout nursing curriculum (Shinnick et al., 2011; Forneris, 2015). Methods A quasi-experimental, post-test-only control-group design was utilized to examine how non-theory-based debriefing compared to theory-based debriefing on students perceptions of the debriefing effectiveness and their transfer of learning following a high-fidelity simulation. Results Frequencies and percentages, independent t-tests, and Pearson product-moment correlation were applied to the data set. The study results did not show a statistically significance difference between the theory-based versus non-theory based learning groups. Additional data analysis demonstrated a statistically significant negative correlation in age and transfer of learning. Further, there was a statistically significant positive correlation between DASH-SV and LTT total score. Conclusions Further research is needed on a larger representation of nursing students. Ideally, transfer of learning and students perceptions of debriefing effectiveness should be evaluated with a more diverse, nationally representative sample of nursing students. Additionally, future research should also examine additional predictors and factors that could influence transfer of learning, For example, sex, type of nursing program, and semester level of the nursing student.   j