Academic Performance and Perspectives on Professional Values: A Survey of CTEVT Nursing Students

Abstract

Nursing profession is being popular among the students in Nepal. The students, parents, health workers and the government have felt the need and importance of Nursing Education. But this education in the past appeared to be inaccessible for the target students in terms of time, space and affordability. Also, the students from marginalized, disadvantaged and deprived community remained apart from this education. On the way to making this education inclusive and participatory, the Government of Nepal made provision for classified and intelligent scholarship in nursing education. The purpose of classified scholarship was to address the need of making this profession more inclusive and participatory, while the purpose of intelligent scholarship was to produce competent human resources in the nursing profession. Despite the practice of scholarship program in nursing education for many years there was no any study formally conducted to explore and inform about the effectiveness of scholarship in nursing education in association with the students ii learning performance. Stepping on this contextual ground the researcher developed mainly three research questions to carry out this study: (1) What is the level of academic performance of fee paying and scholarship nursing students? (2) Do student caste/ethnicity, age, family size, family income; Parents’ education, occupation and institutions affect the performance of nursing students with scholarship? (3) What are the status of scholarship and non-scholarship students' perspectives towards their professional values, particularly in terms of caring, activism, trust, professionalism and justice? This research was carried out quantitatively under the post-positivist research design. The total population of this study was 303. Among them, 125 were scholarship and 177 were fee-paying students. Out of 29 nursing colleges in the valley, 19 were sampled by using Yamene (1968) formula. The sample population was selected by using random sampling techniques. From one college, 16 students were selected for the study. Among them, 4 students were selected from the second year and 4 from the third year from among scholarship students, while 4 students from the second and 4 from the third year were selected from among fee-paying students. The intelligent scholarship students were the class toppers, while the classified scholarship students were from Dalit, marginalized, Janajati, etc. community who scored more in the examination for nursing course. The data were collected by using structured questionnaire and were statistically analyzed and interpreted with the help of SPSS software. The scholarship students were found to have performed better in learning than the fee-paying students. Their educational performances were measured in terms frequency of library visit, frequency of reading course related article, the duration of time paid by the students for self-study and the marks obtained by them in the first iii and the second year of nursing courses. The scholarship students exceeded the fee paying students in all these part of educational performance. Similarly, the scholarship students belonging to the lower age group were found to have performed better in learning than those who belonged to older age group. The students from Janajati were found to have performed better than those from Brahmin/Chhetri and Dalits. The scholarship nursing students belonging to the family with lower level of income were found to have performed better than those from the family with higher income level. In the same way, the scholarship nursing students whose fathers were literate and SLC (now SEE) graduate and mothers were homemakers and literate performed better in nursing education than those whose fathers held higher level of education. All the nursing students (fee-paying and scholarship) prioritized caring, activism, professionalism, trust and justice as key professional values in the field of nursing. All of them positively asserted these values as a part of their nursing profession.