Student Name

Capella University

NURS-FPX6116 Nursing Education Assessment and Evaluation

professor Name

Submission Date

Criteria and Rubric Development

To assess students’ learning fairly and objectively, the setting of criteria and rubrics is essential. Clinical performance will be assessed by simulation for the course “Transition to Professional Nursing Practice” using a clinical performance evaluation to evaluate the learner’s level of competence in cognitive, psychomotor, and affective areas of the learning process. Formal evaluation in clinical nursing education is a method of formally recording the objective evidence of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes a student has acquired that enable them to practice in the professional nursing role (Aase et al., 2022). Well-designed criteria and rubrics facilitate effective communication of expectations and effective learning in the role of the professional nurse.

Part One: Assessment Description and Rationale

Assessment Description and Overview

A crucial component of competency-based nursing residency programs is proper evaluation. This course of study uses a clinical performance assessment via simulation to evaluate the transition from student to professional practice as a nurse. It is assessed to determine the transfer of the knowledge acquired during the coursework to the clinical experiences of caring for patients. This assessment mechanism directly relates to the course learning objective and is designed to assess clinical reasoning and clinical judgement as it is applied to simulated and real-world patient care experiences. Vincent et al (2021) recognize the importance of having a valid evaluation mechanism in nursing education, and state that, “Formal evaluations in clinical education are designed to give an objective account of whether or not a learner has developed the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are required to achieve competent nursing practice. This clinical performance assessment has been designed to allow for evidence to be gathered in the context of authentic clinical practice, with a view to measuring the learning outcomes.

Assembling and Administering the Assessment Tool

By working as a group, faculty, clinicians, and simulation experts will put together an evaluation using simulations of real-world situations (as defined by National Standards and Clinical Guidelines). We will be building our cases on a set of agreed and standardized guidelines that can be put to the test in the hospital and nursing practice. The residents will be given a practice test at the HFH Simulation Lab in Week 6 of the course. This will take three hours total, but will be untimed, so residents don’t have to rush through the evaluation and won’t become anxious. Masso et al. (2022) claim that structured simulations build confidence in first-time graduates and ease the transition to the profession as a nurse. There will be a formal pre-briefing, before the simulation, to set objectives and expected behaviour for residents; a post-evaluation debriefing after each simulation to reinforce learning and provide an opportunity for reflection and practice; and the simulation will include the participation of residents.

Knowledge Gaps in Assessment Administration

The assessment plan is robust, but because of the many unknowns and uncertainties, there are numerous areas that could affect the overall consistency and quality of the assessment process. A major obstacle includes some residents having had variable amounts of exposure to simulation while in their undergraduate programs; therefore, this will naturally add uncertainty to all aspects of the evaluation process. The level of expertise of individual faculty members in conducting simulations is another potential source of variation. The variable level of competency of the individual faculty members could lead to inconsistencies in how they guide and assess each resident in the assessment process. Muirhead et al. (2022) suggest that the variety of clinical practice experiences for nursing learners not only presents a challenge to the standardization of any type of nursing learner’s performance measure but also poses an inherent challenge for any group of nursing learners. Future iterations of this process should incorporate a faculty calibration process and offer residents the opportunity to pre-experience simulation demonstration re-evaluation before taking the assessment tool to ensure equal opportunity to prepare for success for all nursing learners.

Learning Domains: Cognitive, Psychomotor, and Affective

This evaluation is designed to evaluate a nurse’s skills more comprehensively by measuring the ability to acquire a comprehensive assessment of their skills as compared to QSEN competencies and best practice in all geographical areas. Before simulating a patient encounter (simulation), the cognitive learning domain is evaluated by having residents complete an alternate form of the case-based analysis by documenting what they would do in accordance with QSEN competencies. Residents are evaluated on the psychomotor learning domain during the simulation, in which they are expected to accurately demonstrate a range of nursing skills such as patient assessment, medication administration, and safety measures with simulated patients according to standards of care. Lastly, the affective domain is evaluated after the simulation by asking residents about their emotions, values, and communication skills regarding interaction with members of a healthcare team. AlRatrout et al. (2025) stated that when the QSEN competencies (patient-and-family cantered care, safety, and collaboration) are used to evaluate nursing, nursing programs can develop and apply alternative assessment strategies to evaluate nursing students’ development, increasing nursing and nurse practitioners’ competencies throughout the nation.

Knowledge Gaps in Domain Assessment

To ensure that assessments/evaluations are of a higher standard and equitable, the gaps in assessment need to be identified in the domain. The uncertainty of this area (affective domain, values, attitudes, and emotional reactions) is especially high because attitudes, values, and emotional reactions of learners are subjective and hard to measure with standardised measurement techniques. In addition, the cognitive domain (assessed by asking residents questions based on a diagnosis before a case) may not adequately measure the complexity of thought exhibited by a graduate when responding with a clinical reasoning process related to patient evaluation and management in a complex and dynamic environment. Several methods would be necessary to assess the competence of new graduate nurses in their practice to evaluate their ability, not just providing one-point (singular format) measurement of performance; therefore, any revisions to future assessments must have either an observational checklist for faculty or a verification of competency (validation) to limit subjectivity in the measurement and support the validity of the assessment as a whole (Liaw et al., 2024).

Performance-Level Criteria and Progression

By having different levels of performance, the assessment can be open and consistent, and is aligned with the expected nursing competency. The rubric utilized for this assessment has four levels: Distinguished, Proficient, Basic, and Non-Performance, with each of the four levels containing anchors to defined, observable behaviour as related to the course learning objectives. The shift from Non-Performance to Distinguished indicates a higher level of clinical independence, clinical accuracy, and clinical judgment for conducting nursing activities. The initial starting point for residents is at the Non-Performance level, where they are unable to complete tasks and advance to completing exemplary tasks in a clinical, independent manner. All residents are assumed to have a foundation of knowledge related to basic nursing concepts at the beginning of the course, and as they continue to advance in their program, they will continue to build their knowledge base as needed. Smart and Wall (2023) indicated that rubric-based evaluations (when aligned to the AACN Essentials) can provide an educator with a systematic method of determining if students are meeting nursing professional standards that are typically utilized by many nurses when evaluating other nursing professionals through their prospective practice settings.

Communicating Grading Expectations to Learners

The timely and clear expression of grading expectations is very important. This will assist in building successful students and overcoming the fear of assessments. All residents will be given access to the grading rubric (the completed rubric that will be used to grade) at the orientation session of the course in Week 1. In addition, faculty will engage in a verbal walkthrough of the rubric for the purpose of understanding the criteria as part of their course orientation process. A copy of the grading rubric will also be incorporated into the course syllabus given to all residents. Additionally, an electronic copy of the rubric will be made available within the hospital’s learning management system, allowing the residents to keep the rubric readily available to use throughout the course. One more approach to this will be facilitated by faculty during Week 5, where they will hold a question-and-answer session(s) to discuss the rubric with the resident(s) before the actual evaluation takes place during Week 6 in the Simulator format (as has been demonstrated to benefit learners in previous studies; Elendu et al., 2024).

Validity and Reliability of the Assessment

To guarantee that an assessment tool validates and measures what it was intended to measure, it is important to have both validity and reliability. In order to verify content validity, the assessment scenarios and rubric criteria will be reviewed formally with subject matter experts (clinical nurse educators and simulation experts), indicating that assessment scenarios and rubric criteria are aligned with course objectives and professional nursing standards. To increase reliability, reliability testing will be used by inter-rater reliability methods to have two raters independently evaluate each of the pilot simulation scores, and they will compare their evaluation of each pilot simulation to see if there are discrepancies in their evaluation before using it for actual administrative purposes. A standardized and structured assessment process is essential to successfully assessing and measuring the competency of the new graduate nurse, according to Hyun et al. (2022). Validity and reliability will continue to be monitored by annually reviewing the instrument with faculty, conducting resident surveys, and analysing the instrument at the item level to facilitate the ongoing quality improvement of the instrument.

Part Two: Grading Rubric

Course: Transition to Professional Nursing Practice

Learner: Alem AT

Faculty: Professor Name

Date: April 5, 2026

Conclusion

All nurse residency programs should incorporate an effective assessment and rubric for successful completion. While there are many competencies associated with nursing practice, one competency model could be used to measure the same competencies related to resident completion of a nurse residency program, but this may not apply to every nurse residency program. A competency evaluation instrument for the competency of the “Transition to Professional Nursing Practice” course needed to be developed, requiring the development of a simulation-based clinical performance evaluation. The evaluation of the performance is carried out based on a multi-domain approach so that residents are able to show their competence in 3 domains of learning: cognitive (thinking), psychomotor (doing), and affective (feeling). Thus, the simulation clinical performance evaluation is being developed in partnership with experts in the field, carried out in a structured simulation environment, and shared with residents before administration for evaluation transparency and equity.