Exploration of nursing faculty members lived experiences of objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) in undergraduate nursing education

5^th International Conference on Family Nursing

June 13-15, 2016 Philadelphia, USA

Cordelia Obizoba

Bowie State University, Maryland, USA

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Nurs Care

Abstract :

The effective evaluation of students� clinical competencies is a challenge to nurse educators due to variations in clinical experiences and the subjectivity of numerous traditional methods. Contrary to the subjectivity of the traditional evaluation method, OSCE is considered a valid, objective and powerful tool in the formative or summative evaluation of students� clinical competencies. However, OSCE is not frequently used in undergraduate nursing programs due to its high resource intensiveness in terms of the number of faculty, materials and time required for organization and implementation. This study illuminated the lived experiences of the faculty in a nursing program involved in the OSCE evaluation method. Through observations and audio-taped open-ended semi-structured individual interviews, data were collected from ten faculty members, transcribed and analyzed using the Colaizzi�s (1978) 7-step data analysis method. The cluster of themes that emerged showed varied formative and summative OSCE-type evaluation of competencies among clinical courses, driving and restraining forces of OSCE and strategies the faculty use to ameliorate the restraining forces. Implications for nursing education, practice, and research based on the findings of the study included awareness of the drawbacks of an OSCE-type evaluation as a challenge that should not negate its utilization. Furthermore, the results provided recommendations for improvement in strategies to programs utilizing or not utilizing the OSCE method of evaluation of skills competencies.

Biography :

Cordelia Obizoba is an Assistant Professor of Nursing at Bowie State University. She has obtained her PhD in Nursing Education from Capella University, Minnesota in 2014. Her educational development was influenced by the knowledge that education provides the opportunity for an upward social mobility. She has recently presented at the International Conference on the Institutional Leadership, Learning and Teaching (ILLT) in London, UK. She believes in transformative student-centered educational learning activities that enable the learner through active participation in his/her own learning to acquire adequate knowledge for lifelong learning and work experiences.

Email: cobizoba@bowiestate.edu