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Excerpt from Essay:
tests (CRTs) and weighing scales vs . norm-Referenced
Criterion-referenced assessments (CRTs) are usually the preferred way of assessing the performance of many practitioners inside the healthcare and ‘helping’ professions such as nursing jobs. An example of a criterion-based goal is that a student mastered 90% of the terms on a particular test (McDonald 2002). The NCLEX (National Council Licensure Examination) pertaining to nurses is definitely an example of this sort of a evaluation: all rns that complete the test can acquire licensure. Quality is regarded to be both reliable and valid. “The reliability in the NCLEX assessment is evaluated via a decision consistency statistic. This statistic is used rather than traditional trustworthiness statistic just like Cronbach’s first because it records the dependability of dichotomous pass/fail decisions rather than the reliability of continuous scores or ability estimates” (Reliability of NCLEX, 2013, NCSBN: 2).
In terms of the NCLE, the exam attempts to assure content quality; face quality; construct quality; predictive quality; and credit scoring (passing standard) validity. Various item writers are caught to ensure the content material will “cover the entire domain of basic nursing practice; ” sample validity can be ensured simply by “on going evaluation from the scope of entry-level nursing practice; inches face quality is guaranteed through “real and controlled examinations… examine by skilled test programmers to ensure that the balance and accommodement of articles is about face, associated with the domain of nursing; ” scoring validity is determined by the process whereby “each examinee receives at least 12-15 ‘tryout’ itemsnot counted towards an examinee’s scoreperformance about these items can be tracked for a lot of examinees” to evaluate what types of examinees do well around the test; and “the minimum level of expertise that an examinee must attain in order to move the NCLEX examination can be investigated completely on a triennial basis” (Reliability of NCLEX, 2013, NCSBN: 3-4).
The NCLEX check is a criterion-referenced test in contrast to a norm-referenced test whereby the score is determined by the performance of the other test-takers. Partly because the NCLEX is criterion-based, it would not be valid to test in other populations since it is specifically designed to measure medical competency. And actual tests, criterion-referenced nursing scales also can measure important nursing qualities. For example , the Nursing Scholar Self-Efficacy Scale measures nursing students’ self-efficacy beliefs, psychomotor skill efficiency and conversation skills. The test was normed upon 421 nursing learners and “40% of the things provided large information about self-efficacy and twenty percent provided moderately high information” (Stump, Husman, Brem 2013). Similarly, this scale is intended solely to measure abilities in romance to breastfeeding and is not suitable for various other populations.
References
McDonald, Meters. (2002). Organized assessment of learning results: Developing multiple-choice exams. Smith Bartlett Learning
Reliability of NCLEX. (2013).
