Learning Styles and Preferred Nursing Specialties of Nursing Students

교육과정별 간호학생의 학습유형과 간호분야 선호에 관한 일 연구

The purpose of this study is to identify the difference in learning styles, learning stages, and preferred nursing specialties between two groups of nursing programs, regular BSN and RN-BSN. The survey instrument was a simplified version of the Kolb's Learning-Style Instrument which was developed by the researcher, a self- reported learning style questionnaire with twelve questions related to the four learning stages. The sample of the study was the 218 nursing students in a university in Korea which consisted of 58 junior and 67 senior students in the regular BSN program, and 58 junior and 35 senior students in the RN-BSN program. Main findings of the study were as the following. 1) Over all, the major learning style was either the diverger or the accomodator; the most preferred learning stage was the concrete experience and the leastly preferred learning stage was the abstractive conceptualization learning stage; and the most preferred nursing specialty in the future was the clinical nursing. 2) Students in the BSN program preferred four learning stages with rather equal proportion, whereas the students in the RN-BSN program preferred the concrete experience learning stage as high as 60.3% and the abstractive conceptualization learning stage as low as 9.5%. 3)For the future career, the junior students of both programs preferred clinical and educational nursing areas, and the senior students of both programs preferred clinical and research areas. The main reason of the difference seemed to result from the different courses such as Health Education or Teaching Method for the juniors and the Nursing Research for the seniors of both groups. Because the sample of the study was limited to a university, it is difficult to generalize the study results for the entire nursing students in Korea. Continuous studies with larger numbers of nursing students and nurse educators, and experimental studies measuring the effects of new curricula are needed for the future.