An Innovative Evaluation in Fundamental Nursing Curriculum for Novice Nursing Students: An Observational Research.

BACKGROUND

is the first specialized curriculum for nursing students, laying a foundation for nursing education. includes many important basic nursing skills, which suggests the traditional examination could not evaluate how well students learn. Since the OSCE (objective structured clinical examination) developed, it has been used among newly graduated nurses, postgraduate nursing students and achieved some success. OSCE might be a better way to evaluate and reflect students' fundamental nursing skills and comprehensive abilities, although few studies have put it into practice.

OBJECTIVES

To build an examination model relating to based on OSCE, and put this examination model into practice, and then evaluate the reliability and validity of this examination model.

DESIGN

This study is to design an examination model based on literature and teaching purposes of . A quantitative descriptive survey methodology was used to obtain the students' outcome and the views of the students on the process and outcome.

SETTINGS

This study was conducted in the nursing school of one comprehensive university in Beijing, China.

PARTICIPANTS

99 undergraduate nursing students in second year participated in this study.

METHODS

The OSCE consisted of 4 interactive simulated patient stations, 2 operating stations without standard patients, 2 theoretical stations. We designed 4 standardized process-based case scenarios and corresponding scripts pertinent to each station. 4 standard patients and 8 teachers of were recruited, trained and evaluated before the implementation of objective structured clinical examination.

RESULTS

The average score of overall fundamental nursing skills was 90.51 ± 4.00. The Cronbach alpha was 0.665, demonstrating the OSCE is reliable. The content validity of each station varies from 0.90-1, and the criterion validity was promising (R = 0.661, p = 0.000). Also, most students were in favor of OSCE to evaluate in .

CONCLUSIONS

The OSCE is a reliable and valid assessment tool in . Meanwhile, it could inspire students' critical thinking and promote students' communication skills. Through successive application of OSCE in nursing education from the very beginning, it might also have some potential effect on the clinical performance.