Abstract
This research was designed to determine whether two attitude measures, designed specifically for prediction of achievement in nursing education, and a set of divergent thinking (DT) tests could increase the predictive efficiency of an established set of cognitive measures. Data were gathered from five schools of nursing. A set of cognitive predictor variables was used as the basic prediction battery. The following attitudinal and DT tests were used: the Nurse Attitudes Inventory (NAI), the Nursing Sentence Completions (NSC), Consequences, Alternate Uses, and a creativity self-rating scale. The criteria were seven semester and cumulative grade averages. Separate multiple regression analyses were used to find the optimum sets of predictors within each of the four sets of measures. Each attitudinal and DT optimum set was then combined with the optimum cognitive set in order to determine the increase in predictive efficiency beyond the optimum cognitive set alone. The multiple correlations were significantly increased for three criteria when the optimum divergent thinking variables, the NAI, and the NSC were added to the optimum cognitive sets of predictors.
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