Educational Assessment in Health Education and Test System

Nursing Test System for Education and Certification

Assessment  in health education can be done by test and inn nursing by National Council Licensure Examinations, the NCLEX-RN or NCLEX-PN.

Assessment And The Educational Process

    In all areas of nursing education and practice, assessment is important to obtain information about student learning, evaluate competencies and clinical performance, and arrive at other decisions about students and nurses. Assessment is integral to monitoring the quality of educational and healthcare programs. By evaluating outcomes achieved by students, graduates, and patients, the effectiveness of programs can be measured and decisions can be made about needed improvements.

    Assessment provides a means of ensuring accountability for the quality of education and services provided. Nurses, like other healthcare professionals, are accountable to their patients and society in general for meeting patients' health needs. Along the same lines, nurse educators are accountable for the quality of teaching provided to learners, outcomes achieved, and overall effectiveness of educational programs. Educational institutions also are accountable to their governing bodies and society in terms of educating graduates for present and future roles. 

    Through assessment, nurse educators and other healthcare professionals collect information for evaluating the quality of their teaching and programs as well as documenting outcomes for others to review. All educators, regardless of the setting, need to be knowledgeable about assessment, testing, measurement, and evaluation.

Assessment

    Educational assessment involves collecting information to make decisions about learners, programs, and educational policies. Mislevy (2017) defined assessment as gathering information about what students know and can do. Are students learning the important concepts in the course and developing the clinical competencies? With information collected through assessment, the teacher can determine relevant learning activities to meet students' learning needs and help them improve performance.

Assessment that provides information about learning needs is diagnostic; Teachers use that information to decide on the appropriate content, learning activities, and practice opportunities for students to meet the desired learning outcomes. Assessment also generates feedback for students, which is particularly important in clinical practice as students develop their competencies and learn to think through complex clinical situations. 

    Feedback from assessment similarly informs the teacher and provides data for deciding how best to teach certain content and skills; in this way, assessment enables teachers to improve their educational practices and how they teach students.Another important purpose of assessment is to provide valid and reliable data for determining students' grades. 

    Although nurse educators continually assess students progress in meeting the outcomes of learning and developing the clinical competencies, they also need to measure students' achievement in the course.Grades serve that purpose. Assessment strategies provide the data for faculty to determine whether students achieved the outcomes and developed the essential clinical competencies.Grades are symbols for instance, the letters A through F for reporting student achievement. 

    Assessment generates information for decisions about courses, the curriculum, and the nursing program. In this context, assessment is the process of collecting information for program evaluation and accreditation. Other uses of assessment information are to select students for admission to an educational institution and a nursing program and place students in appropriate courses. 

    A broad view of assessment is that it encompasses the entire process of evaluating learners and institutional effectiveness (Banta & Palomba , 2014).There are many assessment strategies that teachers can use to obtain information about students' learning and performance. 

    These methods include tests that can be developed with different types of items, papers, other written assignments, projects, small-group activities, oral presentations, e-portfolios, observations of performance, simulation-based assessments, objective structured clinical examinations (OCSEs) , and conferences, among others. Each of those assessment strategies as well as others is presented in this book. Brookhart and Nitko (2019) identified five guidelines for effective assessment.

    These guidelines should be considered when deciding on the assessment strategy and its implementation in the classroom, online course, skills or simulation laboratory, or clinical setting.

1. Identify the learning objectives (outcomes or competencies) to be assessed. These provide the basis for the assessment: The teacher determines whether students are meeting or have met the outcomes and competencies. The clearer the teacher is about what to assess, the more effective will be the assessment.

2. Match the assessment strategy to the learning goal. The assessment strategy needs to provide information about the particular outcome or competency being assessed. If the outcome relates to analyzing issues in the care of patients with chronic pain, a true–false item about a pain medication would not be appropriate. An essay item, however, in which students analyze a scenario about an adult with chronic pain and propose multiple approaches for pain management would provide relevant information for deciding whether students achieved that outcome.

3. Meet the students' needs. Students should be clear about what is expected of them. The assessment strategies, in turn, should provide feedback to students about their progress and achievement in demonstrating those expectations, and should guide the teacher in determining the instruction needed to improve performance.

4. Use multiple assessment strategies and indicators of performance for each outcome. It is unlikely that one assessment strategy will provide sufficient information about achievement of the outcomes. A test that contains mainly recall items will not provide information on students' ability to apply concepts to practice or analyze clinical situations. The extent and depth of student learning is often difficult to measure on a test. In most courses, multiple assessment strategies are needed to determine whether the outcomes were met.

5. Keep in mind the limitations of assessment when interpreting the results. One test, one paper, one observation in clinical practice, or one simulation activity may not be a true measure of the student's learning and performance. Many factors can influence the assessment, particularly in the clinical setting, and the information collected in the assessment is only a sample of the student's overall achievement and performance.

Testing

    A test is a set of items to which students respond in written or oral form, typically during a fixed period of time. Brookhart and Nitko (2019) defined a test as an instrument or a systematic procedure for describing one or more characteristics of a student. Tests are typically scored based on the number or percentage of answers that are correct and are administered similarly to all students. 

    Although students often do dread tests, information from tests enables faculty to make important decisions about students. Tests are used frequently as an assessment strategy. They can be used at the beginning of a course or instructional unit to determine whether students have the prerequisite knowledge for achieving the outcomes or whether they have already met them.With courses that are competency based, students can then progress to the next area of instruction. 

    Test results also indicate gaps in learning and performance that should be addressed first. With that information, teachers can better plan their instruction. Tests can be used during the instruction to provide the basis for formative assessment (Miller, Linn, & Gronlund, 2013). This form of assessment is to monitor learning progress, provide feedback to students, and suggest additional learning activities as needed. When teachers are working with large groups of students, it is difficult to gear the instruction to meet each student's needs. 

    However, diagnostic quizzes and tests reveal content areas in which individual learners may lack knowledge. Not only do the test results guide the teacher in suggesting remedial learning activities, but they also serve as feedback to students about their learning needs. In some nursing programs, students take commercially available tests as they progress through the curriculum to identify gaps in their learning and prepare them for taking the

    National Council Licensure Examinations, the NCLEX-RN or NCLEX-PN. Tests are used for selecting students for admission to higher education settings and to nursing programs. Admission tests provide norms that allow comparison of the applicant's performance with that of other applicants. Tests also may be used to place students into appropriate courses. Placement tests, taken after students have been admitted, provide data for determining which courses they should complete in their programs of study. 

    For example, a diagnostic test of statistics may determine whether a nursing student is required to take a statistics course prior to beginning graduate study.By reviewing test results, teachers can identify content areas that students learned and did not learn in a course. With this information, faculty can modify the instruction to better meet student learning needs in future courses. 

    Last, testing may be an integral part of the curriculum and program evaluation in a nursing education program. Students may complete tests to measure program outcomes rather than to document what was learned in a course. Test results for this purpose often suggest are as of the curriculum for revision and may be used for accreditation reports.