Utilization of the teaching strategies among nurse tutors in Malawi nursing colleges

Abstract

BACKGROUND: There are numerous teaching strategies that suit the pedagogical learning, but not all can yield the desired outcome and be properly applied by nurse tutors in both classroom and clinical area. Therefore, identifying the utilization of the teaching strategy for nurse tutors is very detrimental in nursing education. METHODS: Descriptive exploratory design which utilized both qualitative and sequential quantitative methods was applied to Iterated Purposive Probability Sampling (IPPS) of 10 nursing colleges in Malawi. This was done to 129 student and 82 nurse tutors in two structured questionnaires, 40 in-depth interviews and 10 focus groups. There were 56 variables for the teaching strategy under five ranked Likert scale and the Cronbach’s Alpha was found to be 0.964 without standardisation and it was 0.963 after standardisation. RESULTS: Direct teaching strategies like the lecture method are very common although nurse tutors prefer to combine with other interactive instructions. There is statistical association of use of role play and group discussion methods and nurse tutor work experience with odds ratios of OR ≤ 1.624; CI(0.576 ± 4.579); p ≥ 0.359 and OR ≤ 1.397; CI(0.882 ± 2.306); p ≥ 0.147 respectively. The ability to use different teaching strategies competently is still very limited among nurse tutors in Malawi nursing colleges. This compromises quality of learning among nursing students in the colleges. CONCLUSION: Developing a new teaching strategy that could combine the different attributes in the variety of the teaching instructions can promote the quality of nursing education in Malawi.