Introduction
Registered nurses must provide training to nursing colleagues or students from other programs at one point in their careers. In response, nurses need to have the right evaluation skills to assess how well the students or colleagues have understood the training (Bastable, 2019). The evaluation may involve collecting and using the information to determine whether the training was successful. Additionally, it lets the nurses know whether the training was positive and what they need to do to improve their practice. This study will evaluate five ways to assess and evaluate students, create a rubric to grade an oral presentation and design a clinical evaluation tool for a nurse educator.
Ways of assessing and evaluating students
One of the primary methods for assessing nurses is using test scores. Students must take tests to evaluate their basic understanding of nursing procedures and gauge their knowledge of medical terms (Bastable, 2019). These tests can be done in a class setting or online exams. Most of these exams are graded to one hundred percent, and therefore, it is the nurse educator’s responsibility to determine the pass mark. While some allow students to fail twice or thrice, others only allow a student to fail once before being dismissed from the program. This is one of the commonly used methods to assess the student’s capability to recall what they have been trained in.
The other method of evaluating students is nursing competencies. These include the various nursing procedures that nurses must perform before they are integrated into the real health workforce. These procedures are essential, and they include the basic first aid routines, patient tests and operation of some clinical devices (Bastable, 2019). Therefore, nurse educators have to use a checklist to determine the effectiveness of students in performing these tasks. On the other hand, the students should be able to thoroughly complete the tasks before they are assigned various duties or even adopted into a nursing program.
Nurse educators may use clinical evaluations to assess students. This is whereby the student nurses work together with other healthcare professionals such as nurse educators, doctors, and real patients to enhance their skills and get the overall picture of what they are supposed to be doing (Billings & Halstead, 2020). In this case, the nurse educator assesses the students according to their interaction with patients and the tasks they perform as well. Clinical evaluation is conducted by nurse educators who have vast knowledge in the nursing field and may have to seek feedback from their educators to know how well a student performed.
Nursing educators can use the grading system to rank overall student performance. During the training or education period, nurse educators can assign grades to students based on their attendance and performance. These metrics are then combined at the end of the training period to determine the student’s commitment and understanding of the taught concepts (Wei et al., 2021). This system is used to ensure that students meet the criteria of a given program. In most courses or training sessions, a grade of A is regarded as a distinction, B is satisfactory, C is a Pass, D is marginal, and F is failing. If a student scores D or F, they may be required to repeat the training to understand better what is expected of them in practice.
The final method used by nursing educators is the National Licensing Exam (NCLEX). This is the exam that nurse students have to take when applying for their licenses. These exams allow the educator to gauge their training skills and compare themselves with other educators in the state (Wei et al., 2021). An external agency governs the exams that the government approves to conduct the tests. The agency should not be affiliated with the school or nursing care in which the student was trained. In the US, the state government determines the pass marks for their NCLEX exams, which determines whether the students who pass will get grants or state funding. Before joining these schools, prospective students analyze these rates to determine the right place for them.
Grading rubric for an oral presentation
Clinical evaluation tool
Conclusion
The nurse educator has a significant role in helping nursing students upgrade their level of care and integrating students from other faculties into the nursing field. The registered nurses must ensure that before a student nurse is upgraded, they meet all the criteria for the specific program. Therefore, they must use the above-stated methods such as test scores, nursing competencies, clinical evaluations, grading system, and the National Licensing Exam for evaluating and assessing their students to ensure that they are successfully ready for the roles ahead of them. This study has also provided a clinical evaluation in the appendix, which educator nurses can use for assessing the student’s capabilities.
References
Bastable, S. (2019). Nurse as Educator : Principles of Teaching and Learning for Nursing Practice (5th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Billings, D., & Halstead, J. A. (2020). Teaching in nursing: A guide for faculty (6th ed.). Elsevier.
Cooper, S., Cant, R., Waters, D., Luders, E., Henderson, A., Willetts, G., Tower, M., Reid-Searl, K., Ryan, C., & Hood, K. (2020). Measuring the quality of nursing clinical placements and the development of the Placement Evaluation Tool (PET) in a mixed methods co-design project.BMC Nursing, 19(1), 1-10. Web.
Stanley, D., Coman, S., Murdoch, D., & Stanley, K. (2020). Writing exceptional (specific, student and criterion-focused) rubrics for nursing studies.Nurse Education in Practice, 49, 102851. Web.
Wei, W., Liu, J., Liu, Y., Kang, Y., Luo, R., & Zhang, X. (2021). Evaluation index system of education quality for nursing professional degree postgraduate using the analytic hierarchy process.Medicine, 100(47), 1-7. Web.