Characteristics of the effective clinical teacher of nursing as perceived by students and faculty

It is presumed in the relevant literature that the characteristics of the effective classroom and clinical teacher of nursing are the same. This study sought to determine the accuracy of this presumption by surveying the perceptions of senior nursing students and their faculty regarding the characteristics of the classroom and the clinical teacher. It also sought to generate descriptive theory by identifying essential characteristics of the effective clinical teacher of nursing. Descriptive theory that can yield hypotheses for further study in this area.^ This research was conducted in two phases. The first phase established validity and reliability measures on a modified version of Sylvia Brown\u27s Clinical Teacher Characteristics Instrument. The instrument was administered to five Faculty raters and 137 senior nursing students in a four-year publicly supported baccalaureate nursing program in Rhode Island. In the second phase, the instrument was utilized to survey the perceptions of a population of 581 senior nursing students and 134 faculty in ten publicly supported university nursing programs in five New England States. Validity and Reliability measures of the instrument were again established.^ Four null hypotheses were proposed that anticipated no significant difference in: (1) the student\u27s perception of the characteristics of the effective clinical vs. the classroom teacher of nursing; (2) the faculty\u27s perception of the characteristics of the effective clinical vs. the classroom teacher of nursing; (3) the student\u27s vs. the faculty\u27s perception of the characteristics of the effective classroom teacher of nursing; and (4) the student\u27s vs. the faculty\u27s perception of the characteristics of the effective clinical teacher of nursing. After Factor Analysis and Discriminant Function Analysis all four hypotheses were rejected.^ Both students and faculty perceived the characteristics of the classroom teacher and the clinical teacher of nursing to be different. In addition, the faculty perceptions of the characteristics of the classroom and the clinical teacher of nursing differed from those of the students. A revised version of Brown\u27s instrument was developed, and the first step of descriptive theory regarding the clinical teacher of nursing was established.