Caring and Effective Teaching Behavior of Clinical Nursing Instructors in Clinical Area as Perceived by Their Students

Abstract

Nursing is considered to be an applied science. Thus clinical teaching is central to nurse education. The quality of the student-teacher interaction in the clinical field can either facilitate or hinder the students' integration of theory to practice. It has been postulated that clinical instructors must possess caring behavior and effective clinical teacher characteristics if they want to facilitate students' entry and learning in a multifaceted world of clinical practice. So this study done to describe the clinical instructors’ caring and effective clinical teaching behaviors in clinical area as perceived by their students. A convenience sample of 113 nursing students affiliated to faculty of nursing, King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia was included. Two tools for data collection were used; the first on was developed by the researcher and it was concerned with measuring the effective teaching characteristics of the clinical nursing instructors and the second one was the Nursing Student Perceptions of Instructor Caring (NSPIC) which was concerned with measuring clinical instructor’s caring behaviors.  The participant nursing students has common and unique perspectives on the importance of a clinical instructor demonstrating effective teaching characteristics. In addition, caring behaviors demonstrated by clinical instructors were identified and they perceived their clinical instructors demonstrated the highest number of caring behaviors from the subscales of respectful sharing and appreciation of life’s meanings. Clinically, the results might be utilized to improve faculty awareness of students’ views on their teaching performance. On the other hand, the clinical faculty can be educated and provided with useful educational tools to assist them in providing effective clinical instructions.

Keywords: effective clinical teaching characteristics, caring behavior, clinical teaching in nursing