Teaching approaches among nurse educators and preferred teaching methods among student nurses in southeast Nigeria: A cross-sectional study

This cross sectional study was aimed to identify the prevalent teaching approaches among nurse educators and preferred teaching methods among student nurses in south east Nigeria. Multistage sampling was used to randomly select eleven nursing education institutions in south east Nigeria. A self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection from 328 students and 178 nurse educators, Data was analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 21. Hypotheses were tested using the Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests at the 0.05 level of significance. The respondents were 85.0% female and 15.0% male educators, while the nursing students were 83.2% and 16.8% female and male, respectively. While brainstorming (96.6%) was the most commonly used method of teaching, there was 82.4% agreement with the enumerated approaches used by nurse educators. Regarding students and nurses, 87.3% preferred all the teaching methods used by the lecturers in the selected institutions in south east Nigeria, and the most appreciated was team based learning (95.4%). There was no significant relationship between the demographic variables of the nurse educators and the prevailing approaches. Similarly, there was no demographic influence on the student's preferences. There is a need for greater training to comprehend and effectively use the game method while teaching for the benefit of the students since, aside from the introduction of games during instruction, nurse educators demonstrate high proficiency in the use of other methods.