NURSING-STUDENTS APPROACHES TO STUDYING

The Approaches to Study Inventory (ASI), developed by Entwistle & Rams den (1983), was administered to all nursing students at an Australian university (response rate = 67%). The purpose was to find out whether ASI constructs also apply to nursing students and to see whether nursi ng students change in their study approaches in the course of their nu rsing education, The ASI was construct validated through factor analys is, While it was possible to reconstruct a majority of the subscales b ased on individual items, only the meaning and reproducing study orien tations were supported. These two orientations also demonstrated satis factory levels of internal consistency for group comparisons, The auth ors conclude that the ASI is a useful and robust instrument for use in nursing education with respect to the two main study orientations, Id eally, nursing education should successively pave the way for an incre ase in meaning orientation scores (deep learning) and a reduction in r eproducing orientation scores (surface learning), However, in this stu dy there was no change in study orientations from first to third year, The association between meaning orientation scores and academic perfo rmance was weak.