Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure: psychometric testing with Chinese nursing students

This paper is a report of the psychometric testing of the Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure with Chinese nursing students.

Although the Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure has been widely used to measure educational environments in the healthcare professions, no psychometric evaluation of the measure with Chinese nursing students has been reported.

Data from 214 nursing students were collected during a 2-month period between December, 2004 and January, 2005. Exploratory factor analysis, internal consistency reliability and Cronbach's alpha were examined.

Five factors were found by principal components analysis with Oblimin with Kaiser Normalization rotation. The original factor names were maintained, but items in each factor changed. These five factors all achieved eigenvalues >1, and in total accounted for 52.186% of the variance. Cronbach's alpha ranged from 0.623 to 0.9 across factors, with an overall alpha of 0.949.

The Chinese version of the Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure could be a valuable measurement for nursing educators in professional development programmes and nursing curriculum design. Further studies need in different Chinese nursing schools and larger sample sizes to be conducted to validate its stability and factor structure.