An Innovative Evaluation in Fundamental Nursing Curriculum for Novice Nursing Students: An Observational Research

Background: <Fundamental Nursing> is the first specialized curriculum for nursing students, laying a foundation for nursing education. <Fundamental Nursing> includes many important basic nursing skills, which suggests the traditional examination could not evaluate how well students learn. Since the OSCE (objective structured clinical examination) developed, it has been used among newly graduated nurses, postgraduate nursing students and achieved some success. OSCE might be a better way to evaluate and reflect students’ fundamental nursing skills and comprehensive abilities, although few studies have put it into practice. Objectives: To build an examination model relating to <Fundamental Nursing> based on OSCE, and put this examination model into practice, and then evaluate the reliability and validity of this examination model. Design: This study is to design an examination model based on literature and teaching purposes of <Fundamental Nursing>. A quantitative descriptive survey methodology was used to obtain the students’ outcome and the views of the students on the process and outcome. Settings: This study was conducted in the nursing school of one comprehensive university in Beijing, China. Participants: 99 undergraduate nursing students in second year participated in this study. Methods: The OSCE consisted of 4 interactive simulated patient stations, 2 operating stations without standard patients, 2 theoretical stations. We designed 4 standardized process-based case scenarios and corresponding scripts pertinent to each station. 4 standard patients and 8 teachers of <Fundamental Nursing> were recruited, trained and evaluated before the implementation of objective structured clinical examination. Results: The average score of overall fundamental nursing skills was 90.51 ± 4.00. The Cronbach alpha was 0.665, demonstrating the OSCE is reliable. The content validity of each station varies from 0.90–1, and the criterion validity was promising (R = 0.661, p = 0.000). Also, most students were in favor of OSCE to evaluate in <Fundamental Nursing>. Conclusions: The OSCE is a reliable and valid assessment tool in <Fundamental Nursing>. Meanwhile, it could inspire students’ critical thinking and promote students’ communication skills. Through successive application of OSCE in nursing education from the very beginning, it might also have some potential effect on the clinical performance.