Evaluating Students’ Clinical Practice and Clinical Instructors’ Competence Educators must bear in mind legal and ethical considerations when evaluating students in a clinical setting. Safeguarding patient welfare must always be at the top of the clinical instructor’s priorities and as such, the educator must always provide an accurate evaluation of students’ capacities. This is important since clinical practice demands decision-making abilities in patient care and errors in such decisions could have life-threatening consequences. (Wong & Wong 1987, p. 507)
Hence, the clinical instructor is expected to be as objective or unbiased as possible in evaluating students in a clinical setting and to “ensure the fairness, reliability, and validity of evaluations. ” (Mahara 1998, p. 1341) This could only be accomplished when the educator establishes a professional working relationship and maintains “appropriate” boundaries between the educator and the students. The clinical instructor must also reflect on and examine how his or her values intrude on his or her judgments of students’ clinical practice and behaviors.
By being able to minimize subjectivity associated with their relationships with the students in evaluating students’ performance, the clinical instructor is also able to “deal definitively with poor performance” and to focus on learning areas in need of improvement among students. In the same manner, the clinical instructor must safeguard both the patients and students’ right to confidentiality and ensure that access to student evaluations are restricted to authorized people.
Clearly, only the clinical instructor, his or her immediate superiors, and concerned faculty are entitled to the content of evaluations of student performance in clinical settings. This safeguards students’ confidentiality and prevents them from being subject to undue humiliation and stigma due to poor performance or errors in clinical practice. Likewise, Mahara (1998) argues that students should be involved in their respective evaluation procedures and should be granted access to information regarding their performance. (p.
1341) Student involvement in his or her own evaluative processes is “an essential teaching strategy both for learning to judge practice in relation to professional standards” and for teaching students to appreciate the evaluative process as a necessary mechanism to improve clinical practice. (Ibid) Wong and Wong (1987) observe that clinical instructors are expected to be competent practitioners as well as competent teachers. (p. 508) This makes the evaluation of the quality of clinical instruction provided to students more difficult and problematic as a the clinical instructor “plays a multitude of roles, apart from teaching.
” (Ibid) As such, an evaluation of the effectiveness of a clinical instructor should deal with both teaching ability and clinical competence. Strategies that could be used to evaluate clinical instructors are student evaluation of the instructor, peer evaluation, or the combined evaluation of both students and the instructors’ peers. The advantage of using a student evaluation is that it is convenient and often easy enough to administer.
On the other hand, students’ perception of what a good teacher and clinical instructor is may be focused on the interpersonal skills of the teacher and on his or her teaching strategies instead of his or her competence in determining students’ learning needs and acting judiciously to meet these in a clinical setting. In the same manner, relying on peer evaluations of a clinical instructor’s performance may not be able to fully capture the instructor’s real capacities in terms of establishing smooth working relationships with the students and in facilitating their learning.
The conflict between students’ and teachers’ expectations entails that a comprehensive approach in evaluation procedures should involve both the clinical instructor’s students and peers in order to come up with a more accurate description of his or her strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in terms of teaching and clinical competence.
Works Cited:
Mahara, M. S. (1998). A perspective on clinical evaluation in nursing education. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 28(6): 1339-1346. Wong. J. & S. Wong (1987). Towards effective clinical teaching in nursing. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 12: 505-513.