Invitational teaching behaviors in the associate degree clinical setting

Area of Science:

• Nursing Education
• Clinical Teaching
• Student Learning

Background:

• Clinical teaching presents unique challenges for nurse educators.
• Effective clinical instructors foster student learning through specific teaching behaviors.
• Student attitudes towards clinical experiences are influenced by instructor interactions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between nursing students' attitudes and their perceptions of clinical instructors' Invitational Teaching behaviors.
• To adapt and validate instruments for assessing Invitational Teaching in clinical nursing education.
• To determine the correlation between student affect and perceived instructor behaviors.

Main Methods:

• Adapted the Invitational Teaching Survey and Student Affective Outcome Measure for the clinical setting.
• Conducted reliability studies on the revised instruments.
• Utilized Pearson Product Moment Coefficients to analyze 15 relationships between student attitudes and teaching behaviors.

Main Results:

• A strong, statistically significant relationship was found between students' attitudes toward clinical experiences and their perceptions of Invitational Teaching behaviors (correlation coefficients ranged from .39 to .69, p < .01).
• The adapted instruments demonstrated reliability for use in clinical nursing education settings.

Conclusions:

• Perceptions of Invitational Teaching behaviors by clinical instructors are strongly linked to positive student attitudes in nursing education.
• The study provides a reliable tool for nurse educators to assess students' perceptions of their teaching effectiveness in clinical settings.