Abstract:

Background: Higher education in nursing should prepare nursing graduates with the capability to take on the increasingly challenging roles required of the nursing profession. Nursing graduates are expected to be responsible for their personal and professional development. They are expected to engage in self-directed learning through identifying human and material resources, identifying their own learning needs, setting goals, choosing learning strategies, and evaluating results of the learning process. Nursing education institutions should add the development of self-directed learners to their mission. Students with low readiness for self-directed learning may prefer more teacher-led discussion and lectures rather than independent learning with anxiety. Nursing educators should assess students’ readiness for self-directed learning in order to implement suitable teaching methods.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe Chinese undergraduate nursing students’ readiness for self-directed learning and its influencing factors.

Method: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted with 536 randomized Chinese nursing students. The Self-directed learning Readiness scale for nursing education (Chinese translation version) was used. The value of the content validity index tested by five experts was 0.915. A measure of internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) was 0.925 in total scale.

Results: The response rate was 90.5%. More than half of students have been involved in small group learning (82.1%), self-directed learning (61.4%) or problem-based learning (61.2%). The mean overall score of self-directed learning readiness was 157.72 (S.D. 15.08). The factors, including academic years, experience in small group learning, self-directed learning , or problem-based learning, significantly influenced the scores of SDLR.

Conclusion: Promoting self-directed learning is a challenging process for faculty members and students. Nurse educators should assess students’ characteristics and learning experience in order to determine the appropriateness of self-directed learning and modify the instruction for students. This finding also indicated the maturational process of developing self-directed learning .

Acknowledgements: We wish to acknowledge the Macao Polytechnic Institute (code RP/ESS-5/2008) for providing funding for this research.

Keywords:

Self-directed learning readiness, Undergraduate, nursing student, influencing factors, China.