Students' perceptions of effective and ineffective clinical instructors.

Clinical nursing faculty possess four categories of important qualities: professional competence, interpersonal relationship, personality characteristics, and teaching ability. The main purpose of this study was to understand of these four categories of qualities, which, taken together, was the main contributor to effectiveness differences among clinical nursing faculty. A total of 214 students from two nursing schools completed the questionnaire, using a 5-point Likert-type scale. The results showed that effective teachers possessed significantly high scores (> 4) in all of these four qualities. While the scores of ineffective teacher were lower (< 3) in all categories, except professional competence. Larger differences in scores between effective and ineffective teachers were found in the interpersonal relationship category, followed by the category of personality characteristics. Smaller differences in scores between effective and ineffective teachers were in the professional competence category, followed by the teaching ability category. From these results, we suggest that teachers' attitudes toward students, rather than their professional abilities, are the crucial difference between effective and ineffective teachers. This research also indicates that students from different nursing schools have similar opinions regarding this concern. Based on these findings, we highly recommend that teachers strive to improve their attitudes toward students as the best way to achieve the goals of clinical teaching.