The Assessment and the Educational Process Principle
In all areas of nursing education and practice, the process of assessment is important for obtaining information about student learning, to judge performance and determine competence to practice, and to arrive at other decisions about students and nurses. Assessment is integral to monitoring the quality of educational and health care programs.
By evaluating outcomes achieved by students, graduates, and patients, the effectiveness of programs can be measured, and decisions can be made about needed improvements. Assessment provides a means of ensuring accountability for the quality of education and services provided. Nurses, like other health professionals, are accountable to their patients and society in general for meeting patients’ health needs.
Along the same lines, nurse educators are accountable for the quality of teaching provided to learners, outcomes achieved, and overall effectiveness of programs that prepare graduates to meet the health needs of society. Educational institutions also are accountable to their governing bodies and society in terms of educating graduates for present and future roles.
Through assessment, nursing faculty members and other health professionals can collect information for evaluating the quality of their teaching and programs as well as documenting outcomes for others to review. All educators, regardless of the setting, need to be knowledgeable about assessment, measurement, testing, and evaluation.
Educational Assessment In Nursing Education
Educational assessment involves collecting information to make decisions about learners, programs, and educational policies. Are students learning the important concepts in the course and developing the clinical competencies? With information collected through assessment, the teacher can determine relevant instructional strategies to meet students’ learning needs and help them improve performance.
Assessment that provides information about learning needs is diagnostic; teachers use that information to decide on the appropriate content and instructional activities for students to meet the learning outcomes (Brookhart & Nitko, 2008). Assessment also generates feedback for students, which is particularly important in clinical practice as students develop their performance skills and learn to think through complex clinical situations.
Feedback from assessment similarly informs the teacher and provides data for deciding how best to teach certain content and skills; in this way assessment enables teachers to improve their educational practices and how they teach students. Another important purpose of assessment is to provide valid and reliable data for determining students’ grades.
Although nurse educators continually assess students’ progress in meeting the objectives and developing the clinical competencies, they also need to measure students’ achievement in the course. Grades serve that purpose. Assessment strategies provide data for faculty to determine if students met the objectives and developed the essential clinical competencies.
Grades are symbols, for instance, the letters A through F, for reporting student achievement. Assessment also generates information for decisions about courses, the curriculum, and the nursing program, and for developing educational policies in the nursing education program. Other uses of assessment information are to select students for admission to an educational institution and a nursing program and place students in appropriate courses.
There are many assessment strategies that teachers can use to obtain information about students’ learning and performance. These methods include tests that can be developed with different types of items, papers, other written assignments, projects, small-group activities, oral presentations, portfolios, observations of performance, and conferences.
Principals of Assessment Strategies
These principles should be considered when deciding on the assessment strategy and its implementation in the classroom, online course, laboratory, or clinical setting.
- Identify the learning targets (objectives, outcomes, or competencies) to be assessed. Before any assessment can be carried out, the teacher needs to know what knowledge, cognitive skill, value, or performance skill is to be assessed. The clearer the teacher is about what to assess, the more effective the assessment will be.
- Match the assessment technique to the learning target. The assessment strategy needs to provide information about the objective, outcome, or competency being assessed. If the objective relates to analyzing issues in the care of patients with chronic pain, a true–false item on a pain medication would not be appropriate.
An essay item, however, in which students analyze a scenario about an adult with chronic pain and propose two approaches for pain management would provide relevant information for deciding whether students met that objective.
- Meet the students’ needs. Students should be clear about what is expected of them. The assessment strategies, in turn, should provide feedback to students about their progress and achievement in demonstrating those expectations, and should guide the teacher in determining the instruction needed to improve performance.
- Use multiple assessment techniques. It is unlikely that one assessment strategy will provide sufficient information about the achievement of the objectives. A test that contains mainly recall items will not provide information on students’ ability to apply concepts to practice or analyze clinical situations. In most courses multiple assessment strategies are needed to determine whether the objectives were met.
- Keep in mind the limitations of assessment when interpreting the results. The information generated from an assessment is only a sample of the student’s overall achievement. One test or one observation in clinical practice may not be a true measure of the student’s learning and performance.