Student Nurses’ Experiences of and Perspectives on their Learning of Bioscience on a Contemporary Nursing Degree Programme

This thesis explores the experiences of adult-field student nurses learning bioscience while completing a BSc (Hons) Nursing course. It uses both quantitative and qualitative data to establish the perspectives of a contemporary group of students on bioscience as a nursing subject and their experiences of learning the biosciences in both classroom and practice. This thesis rejects traditional academic focussed methodology in favour of a humanistic, student-centred, and libertarian approach, which engaged student nurses in unsupervised authentic and naturalistic conversations about their learning experiences. Questionnaire data from 164 final year students found that historic notions of deficiency in nurse education, often referred to as “the bioscience problem”, remain a cause for concern for current students, particularly in terms of inducing anxiety, subject complexity, and a lack of classroom time. Qualitative data from 4 unsupervised focus groups of final year nursing students uncovered six concepts that describe the student experience of learning bioscience to prepare for nursing practice. The six concepts, indispensability, deficiency, burden, angst, reality, and identity, collectively inform nursing academics that the learning of bioscience is disrupted by two tensions or paradoxes. Firstly, there is a value and discomfort paradox in that while bioscience is viewed by students as indispensable, it is simultaneously considered academically burdensome. Secondly, while considered vital for clinical practice, students feel the learning of bioscience alongside qualified nurses is problematic and inadequate. This thesis will conclude that if the quality of bioscience education is to improve, attention needs to be paid to both paradoxes. It will recommend that further research into active and blended learning and authentic assessments could reduce the tension between perceived value and academic burden and that a more evident and symbiotic relationship between academics and qualified nurses could enhance the student’s practice learning experiences.