Importance of incorporating measures of attitude in planning and evaluating nursing education

Abstract

Learners’ attitudes towards a topic or behavior has long been recognized as an important component in the evaluation of formal education as well as in achieving desired behavior change. However, attitudes are frequently neglected and evaluation of outcomes from continuing nursing education often includes only changes in knowledge and learner satisfaction. We describe measurement of attitudes of oncology nurses towards holding discussions with patients about the option of participating in a clinical trial, in comparison to what can be learned from measuring knowledge alone. This article illustrates important insights that can be gained through inclusion of measures of attitude in both designing and evaluating continuing education using data from a larger on-going study.