Faculty's perceptions of students' abilities to utilize self-regulated learning strategies to improve critical and reflective thinking in making clinical decisions: A methodological study

With the rapidly changing health care system, new nurses are expected to be able to collect pertinent data, access resources, prioritize information, solve problems, and ultimately make sound clinical decisions (Kuiper, 2005). Supporting evidence has shown that using self-regulated learning strategies (SRLS) increases the development of critical and reflective thinking within the clinical reasoning context (Kuiper & Pesut, 2004). Despite the fact that instruments have been developed to examine students' perception of the use of SRLS, there is no existing instrument to measure nursing faculty's perceptions of a student's ability to utilize self-regulated learning strategies in the clinical setting. This dissertation describes the development and psychometric testing of an instrument designed to measure faculty's perceptions of students' abilities to utilize self-regulated learning strategies to improve critical and reflective thinking in making clinical decisions. The Faculty Perceptions Self-Regulated Learning Strategies (FPSRLS) instrument was developed in the following three phases: phase one involved a systematic literature review to identify the key characteristics needed to be considered in the instrument; phase two involved the identification and selection of items for inclusion in the instrument, and subsequently establishing content validity via expert review of the items; phase three involved the field/pilot testing of the FPSRLS instrument with undergraduate nursing faculty to determine feasibility and reliability. This Phase was also essential in establishing the construct validity of the instrument using exploratory factor analysis.