Testing the effectiveness of motivation-based teaching in Nursing English course: A quasi-experimental study

Background: Motivation is a crucial factor in determining the student-learning process. Integrating the Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction (ARCS) motivation model into the Nursing English course has the po-tential to motivate nursing students and improve their learning outcomes. Objectives: To apply motivational tactics to the Nursing English course and explore the effects on the learning motivation, engagement, and performance of vocational college nursing students. Design: A quasi-experimental study. Setting: The study was conducted at a vocational college in XXXX. Participants: A total of 229 sophomore nursing students (experimental group = 114; comparison group = 115) participated. Methods: Motivation-based teaching was applied to the experimental group, while traditional lecture-based teaching was used with the comparison group. The Course Interest Survey (CIS) was used to measure student learning motivation; the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-Student (UWES-S) was used to assess student learning engagement (both pre-and posttest). Midterm and final examination scores were used to compare the learning performance between both groups. Results: There were no significant differences between both groups at the pretest in the CIS, UWES-S, and midterm examination scores. Significant group * time interactions were found for CIS, UWES-S, and examination scores. The simple effect analysis showed that the experimental group's CIS, UWES-S, and examination scores were significantly higher than the comparison group at the posttest. Furthermore, the motivation-based teaching led to significant improvements in the CIS scores (from 3.12 [0.43] to 3.66 [0.34], p < 0.001), UWES-S scores (from 3.72 [0.53] to 4.05 [0.69], p < 0.001) and the CIS and UWES-S sub-scale scores of the experimental group. No changes were observed in the comparison group. The experimental group showed more remarkable improvement than the comparison group in examination scores. Conclusions: Motivation-based teaching effectively improved learning motivation, learning engagement, and learning performance of students in the Nursing English course.