Nursing Education in the Clinical Setting - Essay Example

A nursing student’s road to attaining a Bachelor’s degree is full of obstacles and possibilities.  This problem will guide the research study in understanding the situation of the students, especially about the different semesters of their Bachelor’s degree. In addition, the organization of the research study will have to incorporate the students’ input and require their cooperation, especially to match the different semesters in their degree courses to different degrees of motivation. These problems, therefore, require that the study investigates a group of students over different semesters in their school years.

A Research Question for Use with a Quantitative Research Design The research question for this study will be; What is the degree of motivation for nursing students across different semesters of their Bachelor’s degree course? Twenty students will be chosen at random from each year of the nursing course, which will make sixty students, and they will be studied across the three semesters of their school year. The research methodology will be a quantitative one with data collected using questionnaires that have a scale of 0 to 10, which will range from not motivated at all to highly motivated, respectively. The data will then be stored in a computer-based database for further Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, or SPSS, analysis.

Identify the Independent and Dependent Variables for the Proposed Study The independent variable for this study will be the degree of motivation that the students, while the dependent variable will be the different semesters that the students attend during their school year.

Directional and Non-directional Hypotheses for the Study For this study, the non-directional hypothesis will be that there is a significant difference in the motivation of nursing students during different semesters of their degree course. The directional hypothesis will be that the motivation of nursing students scores more highly during the first semester and the last semester. Choice of Hypotheses The reason these hypotheses were reached is that it is expected the motivation of nursing students is expected to be higher during the first semester because they have joined their studies (Emerson, 2012). They are likely motivated to study nursing and learn what it is all about. The motivation of nursing students during the last year of their degree course is also expected to be higher because they have come to the end of their course, which means that they are about to join a health facility as employees and become independent.

Importance of the Problem and How the Study Links Theory, Research, and Practice The motivation of students in nursing is coupled with their energy in starting, maintaining, and directing the behavioral aspects of their education (Emerson, 2012)Notably, the commitment and interest of students vary throughout their education, which makes it interesting to study their experiences with regards to motivation systematically. This study will incorporate various aspects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, such as the commitment to learning, succeeding, and performing, as well as their desire for a reward due to their success, respectively. The most important theory in this study will be goal theory, which is divided into mastery goals that focus on competence development areas related to outcomes of learning, as well as performance goals that deal with competition with others (Emerson, 2012). These goals are best studied using a graded questionnaire.   Read More