Development of Nursing Teachers' Conceptions of Assessment Survey: A Systematis...

• Author(s): Gonçalves, Rui Filipe Lopes ; Ferreira, Maria Manuela Frederico ; Costa, Nilza
• Date: 2012
• Origin: Repositório Científico da Escola Superior de Enfermagem de Coimbra
• Subject(s): Higher Education; Conceptions of Assessment; Nursing Teachers; Delphi Technique
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

Abstract: Understanding the concepts and assessment practices of nursing teachers in the clinical teaching context is still an unexplored field in both Educational Sciences (Higher Education—HE) and Health Sciences (Nursing domain). With this paper, we intend to present the development of an instrument that aims to identify nursing teachers' conceptions of assessment in the clinical context of HE teaching. This instrument is based on the Conceptions of Assessment III Abridged Survey—CoA IIIA (Brown, 2006). For the development of the conceptions of assessment survey, preference was given to the Delphi Technique. This technique brings together information in a structured way and thus allows the examination of the opinion of experts on the subject under investigation, in order to construct an instrument to collect the nursing teachers' conceptions of assessment. After establishing the covenant of loyalty/engagement between researchers and experts, all rounds were developed at a distance based on the CoAIII. The designed survey is an instrument that has the objective of measuring HE teachers' selfreports on the four main dimensions of assessment, following the original CoA-III: improvement of teaching and learning, school accountability, student accountability and irrelevance. After the rounds, we had a consensual version constituted by 27 items as the original version. In the preliminary version, the experts indicated the degree of agreement that expressed their opinion on each of the 27 propositions presented and grouped into four dimensions already identified. Therefore, we may conclude that the survey seems to be a well-designed tool to observe the learning assessment practices used in the nursing students' training. Moreover, we expect that its use in the HE clinical context may provide a more explicit view of the involved teachers' conceptions, encourage reflection and stimulate the introduction of proposals for improvement of assessment practices.