Nursing students' approaches to studying

The Approaches to Study Inventory (ASI), developed by Entwistle & Ramsden (1983), was administered to all nursing students at an Australian university (response rate = 67%). The purpose was to find out whether ASI constructs also apply to nursing students and to see whether nursing students change in their study approaches in the course of their nursing education. The ASI was construct validated through factor analysis. While it was possible to reconstruct a majority of the subscales based on individual items, only the meaning and reproducing study orientations were supported. These two orientations also demonstrated satisfactory levels of internal consistency for group comparisons. The authors conclude that the ASI is a useful and robust instrument for use in nursing education with respect to the two main study orientations. Ideally, nursing education should successively pave the way for an increase in meaning orientation scores (deep learning) and a reduction in reproducing orientation scores (surface learning). However, in this study there was no change in study orientations from first to third year. The association between meaning orientation scores and academic performance was weak.