The predictors of nursing students' clinical competency in pre-internship objective structured clinical examination: The roles of exam anxiety and academic success.

Abstract Background Identifying the predictors of nursing students' clinical competency in objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) is of utmost importance. Therefore, the present study was to investigate the predictive roles of exam anxiety and academic success in nursing students' clinical competency in the pre-internship OSCE. Methods In this descriptive-analytical study, a total number of 102 nursing students, meeting the inclusion criteria and enrolled in the sixth semester (third year) of the graduate nursing program in Iran, were firstly selected by the census method. The pre-internship OSCE was then implemented at eight stations based on a pre-designed schedule template. The required data were also collected through a demographic-academic characteristics questionnaire and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory to determine the exam anxiety score, the nursing program grade point average (GPA) to reflect on the levels of academic success, and the OSCE score to control clinical competency. The data analysis was also performed at the significance level of 0.05. Results The linear regression model, in which the exam anxiety, the nursing program GPA, and the demographic-academic characteristics variables had been imported, could explain 33.52% of the variance of the nursing students' clinical competency in the pre-internship OSCE (R2 = 0.616). Of the variables concerned, only the nursing program GPA could be a significant predictor of the nursing students' clinical competency scores in the OSCE, so that 0.8 points were added to the clinical competency scores in the OSCE as the nursing program GPA increased by one unit (p = 0.000, β = 0.717), but no significant relationship was observed between exam anxiety and clinical competency in the pre-internship OSCE among the nursing students. Conclusions The results of this study endorsed the use of the OSCE in assessing the nursing students' clinical competency and implementing learning strategies to strengthen the levels of academic success in such individuals.