Motivation is an essential component for academic success that requires regulation of effort and cognition (Pintrich, 1988). This regulation of effort and cognition also needs to occur while nursing students care for patients in the traditional clinical learning environment. Motivation includes five subcomponents; intrinsic goal orientation, extrinsic goal orientation, task value, control of learning, and self-efficacy that have been examined in previous studies (Cho, Marjadi, Langendyk & Hu, 2017; Kickert, Stegers-Jager, Meeuwisse, Prinzie & Arends, 2018), but require further examination in the context of nursing education. When educators attempt to understand a students’ motivation for learning in these five areas, adaptations in teaching strategies and education on self-regulatory strategies can be implemented to enhance learning and promote clinical growth of nursing students. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between student motivation and clinical growth in baccalaureate degree nursing students in the traditional clinical learning environment.
Methods:
This research study used a multisite, prospective, correlational, pre-test/post-test, design to examine the relationship between student motivation and clinical growth. Nonprobability sampling with multisite, convenience samples was used. Participants came from three schools of nursing in a large Midwestern city. The schools had similar, traditional 8-semester Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree programs that included 7th and 8th semester students enrolled in a clinical course that included a minimum of 80 hours. Training occurred for clinical instructors on the use of the evaluation instrument before data collection occurred for each school.
Results:
The results from the study indicated that all five subcomponents of student motivation from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich et al., 1991) need to be considered in relation to the Creighton Competency Evaluation Instrument (Hayden et al., 2014) change scores. Two subcomponents of motivation were statistically significant, task value for both student change score (beta = -.44, p < .05) and educator change score (beta = -.34, p < .05) as well as intrinsic goal orientation for the educator change score (beta = .38, p < .05). These findings indicate that the value placed upon learning and the reason for engaging in learning in the traditional clinical learning environment are essential to the clinical growth of a nursing student.
Conclusion:
When an educator understands a student’s motivational scores at the beginning of the clinical rotation, specific teaching strategies can be implemented to facilitate growth of the nursing student. If a student displays low intrinsic goal orientation scores, an educator can select the teaching strategies of self-reflection, self-monitoring, and goal setting for the student to identify areas for improvement, optimize learning, and to enhance engagement. If the student displays low task value motivation scores, an educator can select the strategies of self-reflection or a thinking outload approach (Moorman, 2015) to facilitate the importance or utility of the information learned when providing care in current and future situations. Understanding a student’s motivation provides educators information that can be used to select appropriate teaching strategies to facilitate student learning and growth in the traditional clinical learning environment.