Exemplar

Use Assessment and Evaluation Strategies

This competency focuses largely on the educator’s ability to create effective assessments

and evaluations. The nurse educator should also be able to apply those strategies for making

adjustments to teaching material for the future and to “enhance the teaching-learning process”

(NLN, 2005). The educator uses latest evidence-based practice (EBP) to inform content and to

create assessments, and provides “timely, constructive, and thoughtful feedback” to students

where applicable (NLN, 2005).

Situation: Unfolding Case Study

My final teaching project incorporated several different teaching strategies to not only

improve knowledge retention, but also to improve critical thinking skills and teamwork. The

students were told to get into their clinical groups and then split into two smaller groups, creating

groups of 4-5 students each, for a total of 8 groups. This not only made it easy for determining

teams, but also gave students a chance to reinforce relationships with their peers from clinicals

and learn how to work together for a common goal; this is a critical piece of nursing. The

students then sent a representative to my desk where I gave them the first page of the case study,

The students were instructed to try to not use their notes and to rely on their memory, but they

could utilize their notes from class if necessary. The teams worked together on questions that

mimic those seen on the National Council for Licensure Exam (NCLEX), and when they

believed they had answered them all correctly they would bring their papers back up to me for

grading. If the answers were all correct their team would get the next phase of the case study; if

an answer was incorrect students would have to go back to their group, change their answer and

resubmit it until the answers were all correct.

 The case studies were developed using patient scenarios that would address several key

concepts in the course. Professor Brode had mentioned that students traditionally have struggled

with the intrapartum/obstetric material, and that it would be helpful to provide more

opportunities for them to interact with that content. I developed the content in the project using

my knowledge as Certified Inpatient Obstetric nurse, but also compared my information with

the powerpoints given to students to ensure congruency. The powerpoint information is

supported by the students’ textbook, Maternity and Pediatric Nursing (Ricci et al., 2021). The

three main case studies were a patient with vaginal bleeding and a placenta previa, a patient with

new-onset pre-eclampsia who ends up with a cesarean delivery, and a precipitous delivery

vignette. The main concepts that I wanted to cover were placenta previa (compared with

placental abruption), interventions for late decelerations, cesarean delivery vs. vaginal delivery,

and precipitous delivery. Furthermore, I wanted the students to gain experience with Next-Gen

NCLEX (NGN) questions, thus several questions were developed to give students practice with

questions other than the “Select-All-That-Apply” (SATA) questions that students have seen

throughout their nursing program. I used free sample questions from Naitonal Council of State

Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) as a guide for creating the questions (NCSBN, 2021).

During the unfolding case study, the students would sometimes get stuck on a particular

question, and they would come to me to resubmit several times for the same question. This was

an interesting predicament, one that I had not prepared for in advance. In these situations, I

looked to my preceptor, professor Brode, for assistance in giving students appropriate prompts to

get them to think correctly about the question, but not necessarily give them the answer directly.

This usually helped them reframe the question or find the right answer in their class notes; from

there I made sure to give the same prompts to other students struggling with the same question.
 At the end of the project, students were given a brief evaluation form to fill out prior to

leaving the classroom, one that would provide their anonymous reactions about me as a teacher

as well as their experience with the project itself. Questions included “I would recommend this

project be used in future courses” and “This project increased my knowledge about pre-

eclampsia”, and students had to give a score of 1 to 5, with 5 being “strongly agree”. The total

project time took about as expected, approximately 45 minutes, which took them to the end of

the class period.

This experience was simultaneously satisfying and eye-opening. I loved the opportunity

to help students practice NCLEX-style questions and to help them apply what they had just

learned in their maternal-newborn content. But I did not know until after the project was

completed that there is a particular pattern to NGN questions; typically they ask a lower level

diagnosis question, then move on toward nursing interventions, etc. Though I may have naturally

tended towards that pattern, it was unintentional and I wish I had known there was a pattern so I

could have applied it when writing the case studies. That being said, the students were overall

quite positive about the experience and appeared engaged, which was encouraging to me. I could

also see the students learning during the case study, particularly on the questions that they got

wrong initially.

Significance of Situation to the Competency

The teaching project easily helped meet the assessment/evaluation competency because

multiple forms of assessment were utilized, and strong EBP was utilized to form the project. In

this experience, the case study was a formative assessment in that students could find where their

knowledge was lacking in the case study and redirect their studying efforts. The case study itself

was not graded nor collected, but allowed students to perform their own self-assessment of what
content they knew or did not know. During this formative assessment, I was able to provide

immediate feedback when students got a question wrong because they needed all answers to be

correct in order to move onto the next section of the case study. This allowed students to know

quickly if their answers were right or wrong, and made adjustments until they did get the right

answer.

In addition, the project had an evaluation of both the graduate student’s performance as

well as the overall project’s effectiveness. The students overwhelmingly recommended the case

study be utilized in future courses. Though it is not my role to determine if the project is

repeated, as an educator I would be taking that information to find out how I can improve the

case study to “enhance the teaching-learning process” (NLN, 2005).

The project was also created and developed with several different EBP sources in mind.

In a previous course I knew that gamification of course content was a newer teaching strategy

that could help improve knowledge retention (Tavares, 2022). And after hearing other ways in

which unfolding case studies were being used at the college, I found evidence that it could be a

great learning tool (Cheng et al., 2024). Case studies are also the backbone of NGN questions, so

it made sense to incorporate unfolding case studies into a game format to maximize knowledge

retention.

The final way this project helped me to complete this competency was that I was able to

take feedback on my teaching performance from my professor, Dr. Ruth-Sahd, and apply it to

future teaching sessions so as to continually improve. Her first recommendations were to make

some small changes to the powerpoints, which I did my best to accommodate. She also

recommended I practice the lecture more so that I might not trip over my words quite as much as

I did in the first lecture. I took this advice and typed up everything I wanted to say on each slide
and practiced through it. Though I did not end up reading the slides word-for-word, the time I

spent fleshing out what I wanted to convey helped me to have a smoother presentation.
 References
Cheng, C.Y., Hung, C., Chen, Y., Liou, S., Chu, T. (2024). Effects of an unfolding case study on

clinical reasoning, self-directed learning, and team collaboration of undergraduate

nursing students: A mixed methods study. Nurse Education Today 137.doi:

10.1016/j.nedt.2024.106168

NLN (2005). Core competencies of nurse educators with task statements. National League for

Nursing.

Ricci, S., Kyle, T., Carman, S. (2021). Maternity and Pediatric Nursing (4th Ed.). Lippincott.

ISBN: 978-1975139766

NCSBN (2021). Next Generation NCLEX: Sample Pack. NCSBN.

https://ncsbn.az1.qualtrics.com/WRQualtricsControlPanel/File.php?

F=F_eR8xOxTNt8iyUiG#page16

Tavares, N. (2022). The use and impact of game-based learning on the learning experience and

knowledge retention of nursing undergraduate students: A systematic literature review.

Nurse Education Today, 117. doi: 10.1016/j.nedt.2022.105484