1,721,000 research outputs found
Assessing practice of student nurses: methods, preparation of assessors and student views
No full textAims: to describe the methods of measuring progress in achieving competence of preregistration nursing and midwifery students used by institutions of higher and further education in Scotland and to describe the philosophy and approaches to competence assessment in each institution.Background: institutions of higher and further education in Scotland operate a variety of schemes to assess the clinical practice of student nurses. These are based on different philosophies and practices and this raises the question of which are valid and reliable.Methods: all institutions in Scotland providing validated Diploma of Higher Education programmes for preregistration nursing and midwifery participated in this study. Data were collected by postal questionnaire, review of programme documentation and supplemented with interviews with key stakeholders. The directors of the 13 programmes (seven nursing and six midwifery programmes) were surveyed and also 12 group interviews with students (six nursing and six midwifery student groups) from seven institutions. Students from all four branches were represented and 72 students (36 nurses and 36 midwives) were interviewed.Results: four key findings were identified and related to competence assessment methods, preparation of practice assessors, consequences of failure to meet expected level of outcome and students' views.Conclusions: there has been a change in theoretical frameworks of assessment instruments used since the 1992 programmes commenced and only a limited number of approaches to clinical assessment are used in Scotland. Students' views suggested that they had little confidence in methods of clinical competence assessment and there was no formal validity and reliability testing within institutions. A lack of consistency in the training of student assessors in the clinical areas was identified. Some of these issues may be resolved with the development of a national instrument for competence assessmen
Assessing competence to practise in nursing: a review of the literature
No full textRecent reforms of nursing education have led to calls for assessment of clinical performance to contribute to academic qualifications that incorporate professional awards. Questions then follow concerning the psychometric quality of methods available for assessing competence and performance and the ability of the methods to distinguish between different levels of practice. The purpose of this review of the literature is to analyse methods of assessing competence to practise in nursing and draw conclusions on their reliability and validity. The methods reviewed include questionnaire rating scales, ratings by observation, criterion-referenced rating scales, simulations including the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE), Benner's model of skill acquisition, reflection in and on practice, self-assessment and multi-method approaches. Methodological challenges to competence assessment are raised.Findings of the review are as follows. Questionnaire rating scales used to assess competence in nursing have not been rigorously tested for reliability and validity. The methodological limitations of observation can be overcome with use of criterion-referenced scales or simulations such as the OSCE or its variations, as has been found in research on competence assessment in medicine. The Bart's Nursing OSCE, designed for the end of the common foundation programme of the nursing diploma course, has promise because it provides a close simulation to real life and is grounded in an interpretive approach to skill acquisition. Reflection on practice using portfolios, learning contracts and self-assessment is valid if based on rigorous analysis of critical incidents rather than simple description. Reflective approaches have the advantage of being located in real-life settings and can integrate theory with practice but they need skilled collaboration between teachers, employers and practitioners. The conclusion is that a multimethod approach enhances validity and ensures comprehensive assessment of the complex repertoire of skills required of students in nursin
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
The validity and reliability of methods to assess the competence to practise of pre-registration nursing and midwifery students
No full textThis paper reports findings from a study funded by the National Board for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting for Scotland to test selected nursing and midwifery clinical competence assessment tools for reliability and validity.The study, which took place over two years from July 1997, involved comparing items in the selected tools with statutory competencies for nurses and midwives, collecting assessment data from a sample of 257 nursing and 43 midwifery students in four educational institutions and administering additional assessment measures (the Nursing Competencies Questionnaire (NCQ) (Bartlett et al., An evaluation of pre-registration nursing education: a literature review and comparative study of graduate outcomes, Oxford Centre for Health Care Research & Development, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, 1998) and the Key Areas Assessment Instrument—KAAI) to the total student sample (and to their lecturers and practice assessors) at two time points which were six months apart. Our focus was the programme-specific clinical competence assessment tools but by testing these tools we also provide evidence on the validity of other methods of competence assessment.Validity of the methods was assessed, primarily, by calculating multivariate and univariate correlation coefficients between them. The NCQ and KAAI were analysed for internal consistency.The NCQ and the versions of KAAI for lecturers and practice assessors were found to have good internal consistency. The version of the KAAI tool developed for students showed reasonable internal consistency for nursing students, but less consistency for midwifery students. Correlational analysis of data collected on students showed that there is little or no relationship between most of the clinical competence assessment methods in current use, or between these methods and those introduced by the research team. This finding supports previous research, particularly in medical education and confirms that the different methods address different abilities.A clear finding from this study is that no single method is appropriate for assessing clinical competence. A multi-method UK-wide strategy for clinical competence assessment for nursing and midwifery is needed if we are to be sure that assessment reveals whether or not students have achieved the complex repertoire of knowledge, skills and attitudes required for competent practic
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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