Development of a valid and reliable evaluation instrument for undergraduate nursing students during simulation

Abstract

Background: Many nurse educators are using instruments to evaluate undergraduate nursing students' performance during simulation. Rigorous reliability and validity testing for such instruments is often not presented. Evaluation and testing of instruments used is needed to support objective measurement of student performance.

Methods: This paper describes the development and testing of three new scenario-specific checklist instruments used for evaluating undergraduate nursing students' performance on an Objective Structured Clinical Examination using simulation. The new instruments were compared with original weighted ones previously used. An informal Delphi method was used to enhance content validity; Cronbach's alpha was utilized for reliability testing.

Results: Although neither set of instruments had been used with trained raters, the new set of instruments performed better on reliability analysis.

Conclusions: Checklist instruments may be more reliable in the objective measurement of student performance.