Nurse Educator

Nurse Educator

            The National League for Nursing has eight core competencies that are developed for nurse educators. After reviewing competency 3 titled “Use Assessment and Evaluation Strategies”, the strategy that was chosen for improvement within the MN511 course is as follows: “Uses assessment and evaluation data to enhance the teaching-learning process” (2005). According to Astin, Banta, Cross, El-Khawas, Ewell, Hutchings, Marchese, McClenney, Mentkowski, Miller, Moran, and Wright (N.D.), for programs in higher education to be successful in providing the best education possible to students, meaningful data from assessments and evaluations must be collected, connected, and creatively applied to raise questions to provide a basis for decision making to occur. The reason this strategy was chosen is because a nurse educator must know how to collect, analyze, and put the data to use to enhance and improve the teaching and learning process to ensure the most effective, lifelong learning experience is provided to the students. 

            In Unit 1 Discussion Question within the MN511 course, the student had to develop outcomes and objectives for the classroom and clinical setting related to a medical surgical course. One objective that was developed for this assignment is as follows: After the lecture and skills lab, the student will perform a sterile dressing change on a wound with no more than one error (Senn, 2013). The assessment and evaluations for this objective will now be shared. The assessment will consist of observation and communication of the student during practice labs performing a sterile dressing change. Communication with the students will be related to asking questions about wounds such as why is it important to maintain sterility while performing wound care and providing feedback to the student during the practice demonstrations related to any errors made and positives that was observed. The formative evaluation will consist of observing the students perform the sterile dressing change in the practice lab and communicating with the student related to what problem or issue that the student may be having the most difficulty with and what can be differently that could help the student or students obtain the needed skills and knowledge needed to perform the skill. The summative evaluation will be the final check-off of the student performing the dressing change based a rubric that is prepared and given to the student at the beginning of the course located in the student syllabus. These assessment and evaluation techniques were chosen because this will help the educator identify where the instruction needs improvements, what knowledge and skills the student has gained, and what knowledge, skills, and techniques has been learned and retained by the student.

 

 

References

Astin, A. W., Banta, T. W., Cross, K. P., El-Khawas, E., Ewell, P. T., Hutchings, P., Marchese, T. J., McClenney, et. al. (N.D.). American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) principles of good practice for assessing student learning. Retrieved from http://cetl.ucdavis.edu/assess/docs/AAHE9Principles.pdf

National League for Nursing. (2005). Core competencies of nurse educators with task statements. Retrieved from http://www.nln.org/profdev/pdf/corecompetencies.pdf

Senn, C. (2013, November 10). Objectives and outcomes [Online forum post]. Retrieved from Retrieved from https://kucampus.kaplan.edu