A study on development of a scale to assess nursing students' performance in clinical settings

Aims. To develop a valid and reliable scale to assess nursing student performance in clinical settings. Background. In nursing education, clinical evaluation is important for students, teachers and patients and there is a need to evaluate with valid and reliable scales. Design. Instrument development. Methods. Data were collected at 2002–2003 and 2003–2004 academic years and 350 evaluations of third and fourth year students formed the study population. In the light of the literature and our experiences, we determined clinical responsibilities of nursing students and wrote 77 items accordingly. These items were discussed twice by 17 teachers at a University School of Nursing and then the items were decreased to 28. Each item was scored between 1 and 10. The structure validity of the scale was evaluated with factor analyses and reliability of the scale with Cronbach’s alpha and item‐to‐total correlation. Results. The item‐to‐total correlation coefficient was 0·40 and items were excluded with item‐to‐total correlation coefficient of lower than 0·40. Cronbach’s alpha was 0·97. Three factors with an eigenvalue greater than one were extracted. These factors were ‘nursing process’, ‘professionalism’ and ‘ethical principles’ and their Cronbach’s alpha values were 0·97, 0·94 and 0·87, respectively. Conclusion. This scale can be used to evaluate nursing students’ performance in clinical settings. Relevance to clinical practice. A valid and reliable tool may allow an objective evaluation of nursing students’ performance in clinical settings.