Feasibility of Evaluating Nurse Practitioner Students via Objective Structured Clinical Examination: A Pre-Pilot Study

Problem statement and study question:  Is it culturally and operationally feasible for the School of Nursing (SON) to adopt Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in lieu of a clinical visit from university faculty members to determine student mastery of national competencies?

Background:  Current literature does not identify or support the most efficient means to evaluate competencies in a NP program. OSCEs have been used for over 30 years by medical schools to demonstrate clinical competency of their students and have been proven both valid and reliable.

Analysis:  Nominal data displayed as descriptive statistics in tables showed better than 80% agreement between faculty members in student performance. Survey results from participants were listed verbatim and will be helpful for redesigning the checklist tool.

Main Conclusions:  An OSCE method of NP student evaluation would be both culturally and operationally feasible at SON. However, a checklist tool developed by NP faculty and designed to evaluate competencies set forth by NP certifying boards might prove more beneficial and a better predictor for NP evaluation rather than a checklist developed by a medical school with proven face validity for medical student evaluation.

Recommendations:  Development of a checklist tool geared to evaluation of NP students specifically, would be beneficial prior to further evaluation of OSCE in NP programs. A similar study with multiple universities would offer greater generalizability, usefulness, reliability and internal validity of the process.