Much attention is paid to whether students are equipped to succeed at university, but what happens if academic staff struggle to understand what they are teaching?
A new study by Christine Minty-Walker and colleagues from Western Sydney and UNSW has found that confidence and anxiety in teachers ‘are important factors to consider as they can affect student learning.’
The paper is the first to examine the confidence and anxiety levels of nurse academics when teaching numeracy to undergraduate nursing students and found that almost 50% of the 170 nursing academics surveyed reported they were not confident or somewhat confident, and very or somewhat anxious when teaching numeracy.
The study found that level A academics tended to have higher levels of anxiety and less confidence.
“A significant proportion of students are being taught nursing numeracy by nurse academics who lack confidence and experience anxiety, which can be transferred to students, affecting learning and performance,” the authors state.
“The downstream consequences are potentially poor numeracy skills in students and compromised patient safety.
“Strategies that have been effective in reducing school teachers’ anxiety could be used to support nurse academics.”
The paper points out that with 17,769 undergraduate students completing their training in 2021, thousands of graduate nurses are walking into hospitals and clinics each year with less than robust numeracy capabilities.
This paper is a valuable start – with a workforce willing to recognise their capability shortcomings in teaching and suggestions on how to address it. Rather than assume the problem lies only with nursing academics, it opens the door to a raft of new research across all disciplines, allowing staff to identify areas where they could brush up on their skills in order to teach more effectively in future.
Rather than write headlines about potential shortcomings of our nurses, the study instead begs the question of who is looking at teaching capabilities across every other discipline to build graduate capability – or avoid tuition culpability.
