Assessment or Evaluation and Instruction
The relationship between evaluation and instruction. The objectives specify the intended learning outcomes; these may be met in the classroom, in an online environment, in a learning or simulation laboratory, or in a clinical, or other setting. Following assessment to determine gaps in learning and clinical competence, the teacher selects teaching strategies and plans clinical activities to meet those needs. This phase of the instructional process includes developing a plan for learning, selecting learning activities, and teaching learners in varied settings.
Use Of Objectives For Assessment And Testing In Nursing Education. The remaining components of the instructional process relate to evaluation. Because formative evaluation focuses on judging student progress toward meeting the objectives and demonstrating competence in clinical practice, this type of evaluation is displayed with a feedback loop to instruction. Formative evaluation provides information about further learning needs of students and where additional instruction is needed. Summative evaluation, at the end of the instruction, determines whether the objectives have been achieved and competencies developed.
Objectives for Assessment and Testing
Objectives play an important role in teaching students in varied settings in nursing. They provide guidelines for student learning and instruction and a basis for evaluating learning. The objectives represent the outcomes of learning; These outcomes may include the acquisition of knowledge, development of values, and performance of psychomotor and technological skills. Evaluation serves to determine the extent and quality of the student’s learning in relation to these outcomes.
This does not mean that the teacher is unconcerned about learning that occurs but is not expressed as outcomes. Many students will acquire knowledge, values, and skills beyond those expressed in the objectives, but the assessment strategies planned by the teacher and the evaluation that is done in a course should focus on the outcomes to be met by students.
To develop assessment strategies for a course, teachers need a clear description of what to evaluate. The knowledge, values, and skills to be evaluated are specified by the outcomes of the course and clinical practicum. These provide the basis for evaluating learning in the classroom, practice laboratories, and clinical setting.
Writing Objectives In Nursing Education
In developing instructional objectives, there are two important dimensions. The first is the actual technique for objective writing and the second is deciding on their complexity. The predominant format for writing objectives in earlier years was to develop a highly specific objective that included
(a) A description of the learner,
(b) Behaviors the learner would exhibit at the end of the instruction,
(c) Conditions under which the behavior would be demonstrated, and
(d) The standard of performance.
An example of this format for an objective is :
Given assessment data, the student identifies in writing two patient problems with supporting rationale. This objective includes the following components:
Learner: Student
Behavior: Identifies patient problems in writing
Conditions: Given assessment data
Standard: Two patient problems must be identified with supporting rationale.
It is clear from this example that highly specific instructional objectives are too prescriptive for use in nursing. The complexity of learning expected in a nursing program makes it difficult to use such a system for specifying the objectives. Nursing students need to gain complex knowledge and skills and learn to solve problems and think critically; Those outcomes cannot be specified as detailed and prescriptive objectives.
In addition, specific instructional objectives limit flexibility in planning instructional methods and in developing assessment techniques. For these reasons, a general format for writing objectives is sufficient to express the learning outcomes and to provide a basis for assessing learning in nursing courses. Instructional objectives should describe the performance the learner will exhibit as a result of the instruction.
Gronlund and Brookhart (2009) recommended stating the objectives in terms of the intended learning outcomes of the instruction; Assessment of the performance of students will indicate whether they have learned what was expected of them (p. 4).
A general objective similar to the earlier outcome is:
The student identifies patient problems based on the assessment. With this example, the components would be:
Learner: Student
Performance: Identifies patient problems from the assessment data.
This general objective, which is open-ended, provides flexibility for the teacher in developing instruction to meet the objective and for assessing student learning. The outcome could be met and evaluated in the classroom through varied activities in which students analyze assessment data, presented as part of a lecture, in a written case study, or in a video clip , and then identify patient problems.
Students might work in groups in or out of class, reviewing various assessments and discussing possible problems, or they might analyze scenarios presented online. In the clinical setting, patient assignments, conferences, discussions with students, and reviews of cases provide other strategies for learners to identify patient problems from assessment data and for evaluating student competence. Generally stated objectives, therefore, provide sufficient guidelines for instruction and evaluation of student learning.
The objectives are important in developing assessment strategies that collect data on the knowledge, values, and skills to be acquired by learners. In evaluating the sample objective cited earlier, the method selected—for instance, a test—needs to examine student ability to identify patient problems from assessment data.
The objective does not specify the number of problems, type of problem, complexity of the assessment data, or other variables associated with the clinical situation; There is opportunity for the teacher to develop various types of test questions and assessment methods as long as they require the learner to identify patient-related problems based on the given data. Clearly written objectives guide the teacher in selecting assessment methods such as tests, observations in the clinical setting, written assignments, and others.
When the chosen method is testing, the objective in turn suggests the type of test question, for instance, true–false, multiple choice, or essay. In addition to guiding decisions about assessment methods, the objective gives clues to faculty about teaching methods and learning activities to assist students in meeting the objective.
For the sample objective, teaching methods might include: readings, lecture , discussion, case analysis, simulation, role play, video clip, clinical practice, post clinical conference, and other approaches that present assessment data and ask students to identify patient problems.
General Principles for Objectives Construction
Objectives that are useful for test construction and for designing other assessment methods meet four general principles.
First, the objective should represent the expected outcome of the learner at the end of the instruction. Second, it should be measurable. Terms such as identify, describe, and analyze are specific and may be measured; words such as understand and know, in contrast, represent a wide variety of behaviors, some simple and others complex, making these terms difficult to assess.
The student’s knowledge might range from identifying and naming through synthesizing and evaluating. Sample behaviors useful for writing objectives are presented. Third, the objectives should be as general as possible to allow for their achievement with varied course content.
For instance, instead of stating that the student will identify physiological problems from the assessment of acutely ill patients, indicating that the learner will identify patient problems from assessment data provides more flexibility for the teacher in designing assessment methods that reflect different types of problems a patient might experience based on varied data sets presented in the course.
Fourth, the teaching method should be omitted from the objective to provide greater flexibility in how the instruction is planned. For example, in the objective “Uses effective communication techniques in a simulated patient–nurse interaction,” the teacher is limited to evaluating communication techniques through simulations rather than through interactions the student might have in the clinical setting. The objective would be better if stated as “Uses effective communication techniques with patients.”