Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this project was to apply a consistent measurement to the existing clinical evaluation instrument to allow consistent scoring between faculty graders.|Background: In 2003, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report that called into question the proficiency of assessment amongst nurses and other health professionals (Institute of Medicine [IOM], 2003 as cited in Haladay and Buckley, 2008). While the use of a clinical evaluation instrument has long been a standard within nursing education, use and application remains inconsistent and difficult (Shipman, Roa, Hooten and Wang, 2011). When students are evaluated, within a faculty-led clinical environment, research shows that satisfactory performance should be consistently displayed 90% of the time to best determine overall outcomes of the student (Roper, 2014). These scores should be consistently measured across students and between faculty members. With junior-level pre-licensure nursing students completing more than 120 hours of clinical coursework in a variety of clinical sub-specialties, finding consistency across faculty becomes a challenge.|Methods: At the Creighton University College of Nursing the clinical evaluation instrument contains six overall objectives that are rated throughout the clinical course to determine successful completion. To ensure consistent faculty rating the clinical evaluation instrument was weighted to allow a satisfactory (S) rating to be achieved in each overall clinical objective when 84% of the sub-objectives were ?S? for a junior-level pre-licensure nursing student and 90% of the sub-objectives were S for a senior-level pre-licensure nursing student. A total of 80 student evaluations from six nursing courses were evaluated to identify the level of consistency between faculty graders.|Results/Outcomes: Of the 80 student clinical evaluations in six nursing courses a total of 102 objective ratings were changed:|56 of those changes moved the student from an Needs Improvement (NI) to a S?|5 students moved from an Unsatisfactory (U) to a S|11 NI ratings moved to an U and|5 S ratings were changed to a U|Conclusion: Based upon these findings, it was the recommendation of both the Evaluation subcommittee and the Undergraduate Curriculum committee to move to a standardized method of evaluation within the clinical setting. Based upon the recommendations found within the literature, each of the six objectives within the instrument are calculated to an S or U rating.