The Impact of Instructor Expertise to Student Satisfaction and Retention: Nursing Faculty
Nursing discipline is crucial in every nation struggle to achieve a healthy living objective for its citizens. Precisely, nurses are the front liners in all health settings as well as highly engaged in primary health care and community health. Perhaps, clinical learning institutions plays a core role in ensuring that nations health sector has sufficient and qualified nurse practitioners, which calls for more lecturers expertise. Many universities and colleges across the world keep on reviewing the admission policies to not only attract nurse students but also retain and equip them with adequate knowledge and skills. On that note, the faculty of nursing, especially educators’ expertise, have a significant impact on students’ satisfaction and retention, which requires close evaluation for improvement where necessary.
Good admission policies facilitate student satisfaction, which is the positive short-term attitude of learners towards their instructors and the faculty in general. Student satisfaction occurs when their real experience or achievement surpasses the initial expectation. The journey and shape of nursing profession start mainly from the first day of admission in the nursing learning institution. According to Al-Sheeb, Hamouda & Abdella (2018), the first year of nursing students determines their entire nursing profession life, since it can motivate the student to develop the right attitude or kill the morale, which determines the final achievement and quality of professionalism. Therefore, lecturers, in conjunction with instructors, should role model students in the right way by encouraging and guiding, especially learners who underperform. In most cases, that is achieved through proper orientation, holding seminars for new students as wells as organizing workshop programs, which propel them to interact and express their views which in return give educators an overview of students expectation. Hence, help them in designing the teaching paradigms, such as, the creation of an enabling environment that facilitate students and educators interaction, accessibility to learning resources, which enhances the feeling of belongingness thereby boosting their performance.
Concurrently, student satisfaction enables a student to persist in all kind of eventualities associated with the course, work hard to graduate and further love their future assignments. Consequently, the clinical learning environment contributes largely on students satisfaction, which challenges the education policymakers to keep on reviewing to ensure it favours not only students but also instructors who play a vital role in ensuring the student graduate with quality knowledge and skills to give the best patient care services. According to Papastavrou, Dimitriadou, Tsangari & Andreou (2016), when the learning environment is conducive, there is more students-instructors interaction, which leads to better students’ performance. To be precise, students who frequently interact with their named mentors report being more satisfied with the learning environment, which increases their retention perception. Bearing in mind that, nurse students satisfaction is one of the primary measure education policymakers use to evaluate the quality of learning atmosphere and the curriculum structure of an individual university. Students feel satisfied when their instructors consider them as part of the health workers team and always present to address their issues and guide, other than giving them instruction to follow. Pearson, Wyte-Lake, Bowman, Needleman & Dobalian (2015), argue that instructors should always prepare the learners in advance about the clinical learning environment as well as partner with other nurse staff since there is frequent indirect or direct students-nurse staff interaction, which can have a negative or positive impact despite the effort of the instructor to model them in the right way.
Instructors not only affect learners satisfaction, but they also facilitate the acquisition of professional competence as well as ensuring there are enough practitioners across the globe. Thus, to achieve that, faculty educators should observe behaviours that enhance effective and efficient teaching, which include interpersonal relationship and personality. Further, they should have evaluating skills and competence to point out students need and progress for proper intervention (Labrague et al. 2019). As suggested by Barkley & Major (2020), tutors should find programs that foster interaction and more importantly engage students as much as possible is nursing activities, because when learners are involved, they develop the need to learn more, which boost their performance. On the other hand, nursing fraternity should incorporate instructors in the curriculum development to allow them to teach what they designed, thereby minimizing practices that would kill the morale of learners (Darling-Hammond, Hyler & Gardner, 2017). Gray & DiLoreto, (2016) claim that course structure and instructor feedback affect students’ satisfaction, in that instructors who respond to students without delays motivate students, compares to those who take long or sometimes fail to respond making such students lose confidence and eventually change the course.
Subsequently, nursing tutors have an added duty in transforming with the developing technology, due to the growing e-learning programs. According to Lee, Lee, & Kim (2018), to satisfy the learners, instructors in online learning should consider indivdulearner and the learning environment to ensure proper delivery of learning contents. Traditionally, instructors were primarily engaged in facilitating students’ experience, whereas in online instructor have to practice the role of coaching among others. Garratt-Reed, Roberts & Heritage (2016) reveal that educators who engage online student and guide them properly despite absence of physical interaction bridges their performance gap with those on classroom programs and the only variance is on group work assignment, which promote retention and satisfaction of online studies.
Nonetheless, the shortage of instructor issue is of big concern, which many nations encounter affecting the learning students negatively. The learning environment which is unpredictable or unconducive cause stress and frustrations among instructor leading them to resign and look for a better institution. Phillips, Mathew, Aktan & Catano (2017), reveal that unsatisfying compensation makes the nursing faculty unattractive, employment of part-time instructor reduces their full commitment as they focus on other businesses. As a result, student perceive the learning environment unappealing since they lack enough mentor who can listen to their issue whenever they arise. Consequently, when instructors are frustrated they are more likely to pass such stress to their students thereby creating a bad relationship which result to unsatisfaction cases and further increase issue of students dropouts. As claimed by Yang & Chao (2018), when instructor frequently chance their working environment it challenges their expertise in that they will need time to familiarize with the new environment which therefore means reduced interaction and instruction given to learners. Additionally, making cooperative relations with clinical staffs in new environment does not come immediately, which makes the instructors reluctant to act in the event the students are overworked by learning clinical facilities experiencing staff shortages. More so, some may use discouraging or abusive comments that affect students adversely. Perhaps, to boost the student satisfaction and retention, institutions should employ and retain experience instructor and also come up with learning models such as Collaborative Learning Units (CLU) to boost the suitability of clinical learning environment since it directly affect the learners. Eventually, this is among many areas that should be considered as education institution strive to improve the students satisfaction and retention aiming to equip health sector with qualified graduate nurse practitioner.
In conclusion, instructor expertise have greater impact on the student satisfaction and retention. Hence, educators should begin mentoring nursing students form as early as the day they report in the institution so that they can persist to eventualities that occur during the course work, bearing in mind nursing profession has several issue to encounter such patient diversity. On that note, instructor should adequately prepare and keep checking on learners as well as collaborate with other nurse staff, because of frequent interaction to minimize chances of misinformation/mistreatment by practicing nurse and advance reaction of leaners. Students deem their educator as their role model which calls for education policymakers to install favorable clinical learning environment that will boost the morale of educator to smoothly pass quality content and sufficient interaction with learners. Subsequently, learners who frequently interact with their named instructor regardless on online studies or face-to-face programs, report to more satisfaction and retention rates that those have little interaction. However, faculty educator shortage reduces rate of interaction and in some instances such educators can pass their stress and frustration to learners, which education institution should address.
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