Active and emotional student engagement: a nationwide, prospective, longitudinal study of Swedish nursing students.

The researchers surveyed nursing students yearly during their three-year education, and examined active and emotional engagement. We examined the association of these properties with seven independent variables: higher educational institution, class size, age, gender, prior assistant nurse education, study experience and self-rated health. This longitudinal study included 1,334 students from 24 universities and university colleges in Sweden. Active engagement increased and emotional engagement decreased during the study years. Male students, older students and those with prior assistant nurse education had higher active engagement than other students. Older students, females, students with good self-rated health and those attending universities had higher emotional engagement. Study results suggest that higher educational institutions should pay more attention to students' active and emotional engagement in learning situations, since this may increase the ability of the students to cope with stressful events during their education, giving them an extra resource on which they can draw.

Monitoring the newly qualified nurses in Sweden: the Longitudinal Analysis of Nursing Education (LANE) study.

BACKGROUND: The Longitudinal Analysis of Nursing Education (LANE) study was initiated in 2002, with the aim of longitudinally examining a wide variety of individual and work-related variables related to psychological and physical health, as well as rates of employee and occupational turnover, and professional development among nursing students in the process of becoming registered nurses and entering working life. The aim of this paper is to present the LANE study, to estimate representativeness and analyse response rates over time, and also to describe common career pathways and life transitions during the first years of working life. METHODS: Three Swedish national cohorts of nursing students on university degree programmes were recruited to constitute the cohorts. Of 6138 students who were eligible for participation, a total of 4316 consented to participate and responded at baseline (response rate 70%). The cohorts will be followed prospectively for at least three years of their working life. RESULTS: Sociodemographic data in the cohorts were found to be close to population data, as point estimates only differed by 0-3% from population values. Response rates were found to decline somewhat across time, and this decrease was present in all analysed subgroups. During the first year after graduation, nearly all participants had qualified as nurses and had later also held nursing positions. The most common reason for not working was due to maternity leave. About 10% of the cohorts who graduated in 2002 and 2004 intended to leave the profession one year after graduating, and among those who graduated in 2006 the figure was almost twice as high. Intention to leave the profession was more common among young nurses. In the cohort who graduated in 2002, nearly every fifth registered nurse continued to further higher educational training within the health professions. Moreover, in this cohort, about 2% of the participants had left the nursing profession five years after graduating. CONCLUSION: Both high response rates and professional retention imply a potential for a thorough analysis of professional practice and occupational health.

Generic and professional outcomes of a general nursing education program--a national study of higher education.

Nursing education today is primarily catered within the framework of higher education and combined with a health care sector that is rapidly changing, this has put the focus on educational outcome. The present study focuses on this outcome in terms of generic and professional skills and the professional preparedness of the students. 1,110 students in their final semester of a general nursing program at 24 universities in Sweden responded to questionnaires. The results revealed that the students perceived themselves to have especially developed their information-seeking abilities, critical and analytical thinking and professional knowledge and skills, whereas they did not perceive their education to have similarly developed their understanding of people from other cultures or their engagement in the development of society. Significant differences between men and women in relation to educational outcome were found in almost all areas of the study.