Exploring Self-Efficacy and Anxiety in First-Year Nursing Students Enrolled in a Discipline-Specific Scholarly Writing Course

Abstract

Background: Very few studies measuring writing self-efficacy or anxiety in undergraduate nursing students exist in the education literature. The purpose of the present investigation was to identify if changes to writing self-efficacy and writing anxiety will occur in first-year baccalaureate nursing students who are exposed to a discipline-specific scholarly writing course employing scaffolding strategies as the primary instructional method. Concurrently, this study was the pilot test for a new measure assessing writing self-efficacy, the Self-Efficacy Scale for Academic Writing.

Method: A one-group pre-test/post-test design was employed. Sixty-four paired questionnaires were available for analysis. Bandura’s self-efficacy theory and a scaffolding process guided the study.

Results: Anxiety was significantly reduced from pre-test to post-test (p = 0.005). Writing self-efficacy improved and was near but not significant (p = 0.051). Writing self-efficacy at pre-test predicted 15.4% of the variance in final self-reported grade on the scholarly paper (p = 0.001). Students who reported writing their paper late or last minute reported significantly higher writing self-efficacy compared to students who reported adhering to the paper task schedule (p = 0.021). There were no differences in writing self-efficacy scores based on student past experience with writing or their help seeking activities.

Conclusion: First-year nursing students can benefit from taking a discipline-specific writing course incorporating scaffolding as an instructional method as both writing anxiety and writing self-efficacy can potentially be improved in this population. However, additional research is required to support this claim.