Nursing Education and Evaluation Strategy, Written Communication, Concept Map, Electronic Testing, Web-Based Strategy for Students
Evaluation Strategies for Student Written Communication, Patient Progress Notes and Electronic Health Record Documentation, Concept Maps as Tool of Student Evaluation in Nursing Education, Nursing Care Plans In Nursing Education, Process Recordings In Nursing Education, Written or Electronic Testing Formats In Nursing Education, Web-Based Strategies For Students In Nursing Education.
Evaluation Strategies for Student Written Communication
Use of written communication, whether paper-based or electronic, enables the faculty to evaluate clinical performance through assessing students’ abilities to translate what they have learned to the written word. Review of student nursing care plans or written notes allows faculty to evaluate students’ abilities to communicate with other care providers.
Through writing assignments, students can clarify and organize their thoughts. Additionally, writing can reinforce new knowledge and expand thinking on a topic. Reflective writing assignments, appropriately designed, can help faculty see students move from telling or describing data to translating information to knowledge (Wear, Zarconi, Garden, & Jones, 2012).
Faculty evaluation focuses on the quality of the content and student ability to communicate information and ideas in written form. The rater can determine the student’s perspectives and gain insight into the “why” of the student’s behavior. A scoring tool such as a rubric with specified objectives for a designated assignment can promote consistency and efficiency in grading specified assignments (Stevens & Levi, 2005). Written data help support faculty clinical observations.
Patient Progress Notes and Electronic Health Record Documentation
The use of electronic text-based communication in the changing health care system is increasing, and being able to write cogent nursing and clinical progress notes is an important clinical skill. Reviewing student documentation provides faculty with an opportunity to evaluate students’ ability to process and record relevant data.
Students’ skill in using health care terminology and documentation practices can be examined and critical thinking processes can be demonstrated in these notes (Higuchi & Donald, 2002). With the focus on electronic records as a tool in patient safety, orienting students to these tools and evaluating students’ skill in this area is essential (Bonnel & Smith, 2010).
In some clinical practice settings, there may be limited student access to electronic health records or unfamiliar electronic systems, but faculty can use clinical lab settings and simulations to first engage students in learning to use electronic health records and then evaluating their documentation using case studies. Developing ongoing strategies with clinical agency partners may be needed to continue evaluation of students’ electronic documentation abilities as they advance in clinical patient care.
Concept Maps as Tool of Student Evaluation in Nursing Education
Concept maps are another tool for evaluating students’ ability to document thinking processes and allow students to create a diagram of patient needs and nursing responses, including relationships among concepts. These tools can help students visualize and organize patient-specific data relevant to diagnostic work and nursing and medical diagnoses.
Concept maps can serve as worksheets for students and serve as organizing tools for documentation (Schuster, 2000). Faculty can evaluate students’ understanding of concepts and relationships among relevant concepts and assist in clarifying students’ misconceptions.
These tools also provide faculty with the opportunity to complete a quick review of students’ thinking patterns and determine further learning needs before students perform patient care (Castellino & Schuster, 2002; King & Shell, 2002; Vacek, 2009).
Some authors suggest that in today’s complex health care world, concept maps may better represent care processes than more traditional linear models of documentation (Kern, Bush, & McCleish, 2006).
Nursing Care Plans in Nursing Education
Nursing care plans allow faculty to evaluate students’ ability to determine and prioritize care needs according to understanding and interpretation of individual patients’ health care problems. Historically, nursing care plans have been used by students to document clinical thinking processes, but some argue that the availability of numerous standardized care plans has minimized the critical thinking component.
Some programs report replacing detailed clinical care plans with concept maps or clinical journals and logs. Mueller, Johnston, and Bligh (2001) describe a strategy for modifying care plans and combining them with concept maps to help students clarify the interrelationship of patient problems.
Process Recordings in Nursing Education
Process recordings are used to evaluate the interpersonal skills of students within the clinical setting. This form of evaluation requires students to write down their patient nurse interactions and self-evaluate the communication skills they used.
A type of self-reflection, process recordings provide a form of student self-evaluation that allows students to analyze their own interactive behavior, enabling them to better identify the strengths and weaknesses of their interpersonal communication (Sigma Theta Tau International, 2005).
This approach to evaluation has traditionally been used in communication courses and in psychiatric nursing. Additional note has been made of process recording benefits for students working with hospice patients (Hayes, 2005).
Written or Electronic Testing Formats in Nursing Education
Written testing is frequently used to assess students’ basic knowledge for problem solving and decision making in clinical practice. Various test formats (true false, multiple choice, matching, short answer, essay) can be incorporated into preclinical or post clinical conferences to gauge students’ understanding of specific concepts.
Web-Based Strategies for Students in Nursing Education
Written evaluation formats can also include web-based clinical evaluation formats. For example, faculty can implement post-clinical conferences or lead clinical case discussions within online learning management systems (Johnson & Flagler, 2013). Within online learning systems, students can submit electronic clinical logs to document patterns of ages and diagnoses of patients seen.
Opportunities exist for faculty to provide rapid feedback to students on written clinical papers, threaded discussion boards, or e-journals. Although not limited to students at a distance, web-based strategies are especially popular for clinical evaluation of students in geographically diverse settings. They may be useful as well for clinical conferences and student evaluation in community health courses with clinical coursework in diverse community settings.