Clinical instructors' responsibility is to develop the students’ ability in decision making, critical thinking, clinical reasoning, and develop good interpersonal relationships. Hence, clinical instructors need to implement effective teaching strategies and must be furnished with competencies to deliver the role to the students.
Clinical instructor must possess characteristics to enhance knowledge, skills, and attitude for nursing students and promoting nursing education in a maximum level that may produce high caliber-nursing students. The study aimed to identify nursing students' perception about instructors' core characteristics.
Methods:
A descriptive research design has been used with a purposive sampling technique with total respondent of 102. The study has been conducted at the College of Nursing in one of the University in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It has thirty (30) clinical instructors behaviors in which subjects rated in terms of importance.
The statistical treatments used were frequency and percentage, mean and standard deviation. Obtained highest score of the mean and standard deviation implied mostly perceived core characteristics of clinical instructor by the nursing students.
Results:
Results revealed that among the five characteristics of clinical instructors displays professional competence (50.17) and relationship with students (49.5) were rated as the very important , while the remaining three core characteristics belongs to important as follows: personality attributes 49.2), teaching strategies 48.2), and evaluation procedures (47.8).
Conclusion:
It has been concluded that professional competence reveals the highest score among the five clinical instructors’ core characteristics based on nursing students perception, wherein clinical instructor may facilitates students' awareness of the professional responsibility, communicates knowledge for safe practice, shows clinical skill competence, offers self-availability in a clinical setting, can be a role model, and assists students with new experiences. It is highly recommended for re-study with a bigger sample population. There should be a study related to the assessment on students’ core characteristics as perceived by the Clinical Instructor.