The purpose was to evaluate the psychometric properties of a 25-item questionnaire on learning orientation in a nursing educational program. The questionnaire is a standardized instrument used in industry and universities but this is the first time its psychometric properties were assessed in a nursing students. Learning orientation is a vital aspect that includes elements such as: desire to learn, an outreaching toward the goal, and seriousness in using instructional resources provided.
Four hundred and seventy-two undergraduate nursing students at the first semester junior level completed the Learning Orientation Questionnaire online. The data were imported into an R language processor (Version 3.3.1) for plotting and statistical analysis. This first step was manual extraction to identify correlations between items and group them into categories using cluster analysis. Six categories were formed: learning interest, ambitious goals, instructor, achievement of goals, and lone survivor.
The second step was the automatic extraction of factors with functions in the R language. The items were grouped into four factors rather than six. The automatic extraction combined the factors learning interest and ambitious goals together and removed the lone survivor factor. The lone survivor factor contained one question (q24) with a low eigenvalue of (0.3). This question was deemed both minor and irrelevant to the topic of the questionnaire and therefore is proposed to be removed. The result of the factor and cluster analyses in nursing students was compared to that of a previous study (Martinez, 2005) that used a heterogeneous sample of both high school and university students of many different majors. The differences in the results were substantial. First, Martinez (2005) found three extracted factors in her research in comparison to the current research of four factors. Moreover, the previous study grouped our main two factors into a single factor, which means that the factors for learning interest, ambitious goals, and instructor influence were a single factor in the previous study. The eigenvalues were almost identical to the current research, yet the factors did not correspond. Another major difference between the two studies is that in the previous study’s second factor called “learning independence or autonomy” did not correlate with the description of the factor. The author explains the factor as growing to learn independently by finding the motivation from within. Yet, the questions selected in the factor solemnly incorporate the instructor as a resource of learning. In this study, the factor was placed in a separate category and was labeled “instructor influenced” based on the fact that it heavily relied on the demand of an instructor.
The conclusions are: (1) The factors extracted in nursing students in the present study do not correspond closely to those of the sample used by Martinez (2005) and this might be explained by the greater focus on applied practice in nursing education. (2) The current questionnaire could be reduced in size to 8 questions while maintaining strong measurement quality.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:asrf-1085 |
| Date | 05 April 2018 |
| Creators | Dinsmore, Kimberly |
| Publisher | Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University |
| Source Sets | East Tennessee State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Appalachian Student Research Forum |
| Rights | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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