Assessment Strategies to Evaluate a Nursing Clinical Instructor

According to an article in the American Journal of Nursing, a standard part of a nursing school curriculum is the clinical rotation, where a small group of nursing students, supervised by a nursing clinical instructor, receives hands-on training in a clinical or laboratory setting. A key component in this rotation is evaluation: instructors evaluate students' ability in each lesson, and students evaluate the instructor's effectiveness. Building an assessment strategy to evaluate a nursing clinical instructor relies on a few key considerations.

Format

• Evaluation format is an important consideration when thinking about strategies to evaluate a nursing clinical instructor. Although nursing schools have historically relied on paper forms for both student and instructor evaluation, the advent of technology in various health-care settings has led some nursing instructors to use handheld computers for evaluation, according to a Journal of Nursing Education article by Lehman and colleagues. Other kinds of formatting can determine how much detail you provide as you evaluate a nursing clinical instructor. For example, an evaluation that offers pre-set multiple choices will provide less detail than one that features open-ended questions. Brief evaluations will allow less opportunity for constructive feedback than evaluations with dozens of questions.

Categories

• Developing a strategy to evaluate a nursing clinical instructor will invariably involve defining the categories of skills and abilities for which students will evaluate the instructor. The Journal of Nursing Education has published two helpful articles that review evaluation strategies: Kirschling and colleagues suggest using a tool that evaluates both teacher effectiveness and the course itself. The article recommends evaluating an instructor on knowledge and expertise, teaching methods, communication style, use of own experiences and opportunity for feedback. Tang and colleagues, on the other hand, suggest evaluating instructors based on four categories: professional competence, interpersonal relationships, personality characteristics and teaching ability.