USING MULTIPLE ASSESSORS TO EVALUATE CORE COMPETENCIES OF NURSING STUDENTS: A 360° EVALUATION APPROACH

Abstract

Traditional student evaluations have always been by the teaching faculty with less or no input from the nurses, patients, peers or even student's self. The objective of our study was to use 360 degree feedback in the evaluation of core competencies of final year nursing students and compare the ratings of RN, patients, peers and self rating of student. 374 final year students of selected nursing colleges in Bangalore and Tumkur were enrolled for the study. Patients, RN, peers and students themselves completed evaluator-specific evaluations in the first week of clinical period by using a validated 3 point rating scale of 40 items for both the peer and self and 21 and 20 items for the patients and RN respectively. Mean scores were tallied for each domain and for the total scale. Agreement between the raters was done using Pearson's correlation coefficient. A total of 1496 evaluations were completed for 374 samples. The mean item score ranged from 4.86 to 5.17 across all competency domains. The overall mean rating score for self, peer, client and RN was 43.7(SD 3.16), 43.6 (SD 2.34), 20.6 (SD 1.65) and 20.2 (SD 1.83) respectively. The self and peer ratings of the students were higher than the ratings of RN's and patients. None of the students were at the novice level. The Pearson's correlation coefficient between peer and self evaluation was statistically significant(r=0.28; p at 0.01 level). There was a weak but statistically significant positive relationship between peer and RN evaluation(r=0.11; p at 0.05 level). As different raters rated the students differently there was no significant relationship between self, patient, and RN ratings. This study finds potential value in the use of 360 degree evaluation of nursing students in both the hospital and community settings.