The relationship between education preparedness and teaching styles of nurse educators in undergraduate nursing programs

The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the relationship between education preparedness and teaching styles among nurse faculty in undergraduate nursing programs. Andragogy and constructivism served as the theoretical frameworks to guide this study. Utley's model of factors that facilitate learning served as the conceptual framework to guide the investigation of education preparedness as a predictor of teaching style. The study included a convenience sample of 211 nurse faculty teaching in accredited undergraduate nursing programs in New England. The Principles of Adult Learning Scale (PALS) was administered as an online survey to collect the data. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression analysis were conducted to examine the data. Results of the study demonstrated no statistically significant relationship between education preparedness of nursing faculty and their teaching styles. The lack of a significant correlation between the variables suggests that education preparation is not a predictor of a nurse faculty's teaching style. Recommendations for further research include replicating the study with a larger sample, and conducting a similar study comparing PALS scores of nurse faculty holding an advanced degree in nursing education and nurse faculty with advanced degrees in other specialties. Education preparation of nurse faculty and their teaching styles could be further investigated using qualitative or mixed-methodology.