Perceptions of Educational Environment among Nursing Undergraduates at the Faculty of Nursing, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka

The educational environment is recognised as a key determinant of the learning process, and it further affects student motivation and study engagement. The study aimed to assess nursing students’ perception of the educational environment at the Faculty of Nursing, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The study was conducted solely as a descriptive cross-sectional study among 243 nursing undergraduates at the Faculty of Nursing, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure (DREEM) was used to assess students’ perceptions of learning and teaching, their academic self-perception, the atmosphere, and social self-perception. The mean age of the study sample was 23.07±1.09 and the majority of the participants (79.01%) were female (79.01%). The overall DREEM score scored by the sample was 128.46±22.61. The males scored higher (133.59) than the females (127.09). The highest-scoring sub-domain was “student perception of learning” (32.28±6.87), and the lowest-scoring sub-domain was “student social self-perception” (17.51±3.21). Gender has significantly influenced the “perception of teachers” (p = 0.02) and “perception of atmosphere” (p = 0.02), where males