Iran Journal of Nursing

 Background & Aim: An effective and efficient educational system must be continuously revised to be responsive to the present and future community needs. The purpose of the study was to compare students and teachers opinions regarding theory- practice gap in nursing education in Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences in 1378-79.

 Material & Method: This research was a cross sectional study. The data was collected from nursing student (n=67) and clinical nurse teachers (n=41) using questionnaire provided by researcher in two section, the first section included the demographic characteristics and the second section consisted of questions about necessity and application of content education. The content validity of questionnaire was provided by experts and texts. For reliability, test retest method was used (r=089). Data were collected in one stage and were analyzed by t-student test Kendal’s correlation coefficient, and Chi square.

 Results: The result revealed that the mean score of students and teachers views about “the necessity of the theoretical courses” were 17.86 and 16.35, but they gave low scores to the “real application of the theory in practice” (11.8 and 12.08). There was a statistically significant relationship between the necessity and application of theory (P=0.00). The degree of coordination between clinical education and tasks were reported low (less than 3) by both teachers and students, but, there was a statistically significant difference between their perspectives (P< 0.05).

 Conclusion: This study showed that continuing revision and repair of the program based on students and teachers’ perspectives can help educationalists to reduce theory-practice gap.