Students and teachers’ perception of an effective clinical nurse teacher characteristics: A comparative study

Abstract

Objective: This study aims to determine the level of perception of nursing students and teachers on the effective clinical nurse teacher characteristics and find if there is a significant difference between the level of perception of nursing students and teachers according to their demographic features. 

Methods: This study employed a descriptive - comparative design. Simple random sampling was undertaken and a questionnaire developed by Brown (1981) was utilized in gathering information from the participating 244 nursing students and 46 teachers as respondents. Frequency, percentage, t-test, F-test in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22 was used in the analysis of data.

Results: Most of the participating nursing students in the study are aged 18-22-year-old, female, and unmarried while most teachers were more than 46-year-old, female, and married. Among the three indicators of effective clinical teacher characteristics, the teachers consider professional competence, relationships with the students’ most important, and personal attributes as very important while the nursing students perceived all as very important. A significant difference exists in the level of perception of both groups of respondents on different indicators. However, in certain demographic profile, specifically gender and marital status there seem to be no significant difference but it exists with age.

Conclusions: Both nursing students and nurse-teachers perceived that an effective clinical teacher characteristic has a significant influence on the clinical learning course of students. The perception varies significantly with age and this would suggest that as the nurse grows older and gain more experience his/her perceptions matures.