From long years of experience in nursing education I have always felt that formative evaluation ends up as some sort of judgement about the student's performance. Hence students must be exposed adequately to the clinical environment and the educator should have opportunities to teach, observe and provide feedback. There are instances when we are required to provide formative evaluations every 2 clinical days. Is this good practice? Will this benefit students?
In my opinion formal evaluations should only occur midway through the semester or quarter and again at the end. More frequent evaluations get in the way of active learning. From my experience students are not in clinical 7 days a a week, maybe two or three, so giving a formal evaluation every two days would amount to a weekly evaluation which cannot adequately capture cognitive growth. people do not learn in leaps and bounds. Adequate time is necessary to see evolution in thinking.
Good question!! I opine that the nursing students should be posted in one clinical area for 3-4 weeks together. I am suggesting this with my clinical experience. A student may take 2-3 days to get oriented to the set up and understand the routines. If you evaluate after 2-3 days, it is ‘premature evaluation’. Therefore I strongly feel that give them a sufficient time to practice and you evaluate in each clinical area highlighting more on future implication of their learning in your area. Let the students have stress-free mind to learn and not preoccupied by your clinical evaluation. This may result in better student learning. But, when you have too many areas to be covered in little time, as per the regulatory body, it’s difficult to implement. However, with proper planning of master plan would help in providing the situation for maximum learning.
In my experience as faculty and dean in the college of nursing the prescribed number of hours and days allotted for related clinical experience as prescribed in the curriculum are adequate to meet the desired learning outcomes. We have competency appraisal course with 12 units (6 hours/week in 36 weeks). The competency appraisal course is offered in fourth year level of BS Nursing. On going clinical competence appraisal is being done during the entire semester.
Strategic curriculum planning is a good suggestion to address clinical formative evaluation and other related matters.
The assessment activities of working alongside the student and observing practice, discussion with the student and examination of the student’s portfolio, discussion with other assessors are done both informally and formally to monitor progress. During the formal sessions, which should be planned and timetabled , the assessor should formally review with the student the progress made and identify any difficulties at an earlier, rather than a later, stage of the placement. The number of formal progress review meetings hold altogether during the student’s placement would be dependent on the length of the placement and the progress the student is making.
I contend that periods of clinical training in nursing should not be less than 5 weeks with conducting a formative evaluation in the middle of the experience. While training in the clinical setting has a duration of 35 hours per week, only 24 h are used by students in the clinical setting, and the remaining hours for study and analysis of practices.
A formative evaluation requires written by student self-assessment that will be discussed by the teacher, supervisor and student.
The clinical training must be guided by time of reflection and reasoning practices for the student to have space and time to appropriate the practical knowledge.
clinical days of formative evaluation in my practice is done on a daily basis, if the student performance does not meet the learning objectives. Formative evaluation is done through observation of the students performance on the application of knowledge, judgement, skills , critical thinking and decision making. At the end of the your clinical days, you should have sound judgement on evaluating the student's performance for those days. For me, I immediately evaluate the student performance informing student on areas for improvement. In the BN program (in Canada)
we have clinical learning plans to hand to student, if not meeting the clinical learning objectives
Thank you Jeanie. I agree that we should give a verbal feedback. But I was checking on a 45 item evaluation tool on Likert scale, plus additional subjective comments such as strengths and weaknesses to given to a student every 2 days of clinical rotation. My concern is that there will be no teaching-learning time and only time for evaluation.
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