Instrument Development & Testing for Simulation Research – An Example for Assessing Non-Technical Skills

Time: 10-11am

Summary: Nursing faculty are creative in using instruments and scales to assess student clinical performance and competency mastery throughout the nursing program. Experiential learning opportunities in the simulation lab provide a more controlled environment for scale use and student assessment, yet non-technical skills, such as provider-patient communication, can be hard to measure.

This presentation will provide an overview of step-by-step processes for instrument development and evaluation, specifically for non-technical skills. The presenters journey into the development and testing of the Global Inter-professional Therapeutic Communication Scale© (GITCS©), which will be used as an example for instrument development. The aim of the scale is to support faculty, students, and health professionals in the summative and formative assessment of therapeutic communication during simulation and/or clinical practice. Enhancing nursing faculty’s ability to incorporate instruments that are reliable and valid into their evaluation of student learning in simulation is important and requires capacity building for the future.

This presentation will cover:

• Identification of concept to measure
• Review of the literature for reliable and valid scales
• Developing your own scale: creating items – construct, factor, and behavior identification
• Expert panel review – who, what, where, how; Item and descriptor tweaking
• Reliability and validity testing
• Re-analysis of items; feasibility testing
• Train-the-trainer instrument use for inter-rater reliability
• Future – continuous testing and translation

This free, one-hour webinar will be of particular interest to anyone working in the Canadian health care system as well as educators who use, or are interested in using or learning more about simulation learning and related instrument development approaches.

Presenter: Dr. Suzanne Hetzel Campbell, Associate Professor at the UBC, School of Nursing, Vancouver, Canada, is a seasoned global educator who uses technology and experiential learning pedagogy to build capacity in simulation. She provides ongoing leadership in facilitating faculty development workshops, mentoring new and seasoned authors to share their simulation designs in her award winning co-edited textbook and encouraging inter-professional simulations led by nurses. Understanding the complexities of bringing classrooms to life, she helps bridge the gap between education and practice. She is advancing inter-professional education, research, and practice by incorporating technical and non-technical skills such as communication, therapeutic relationship, leadership and team-building in her simulation research and international presentations and publications. Advancing nursing’s role in the development of knowledge, partnerships, and collaboration to better provide patient-centered health care and her clinical work in the area of lactation with underserved populations has led her to global and interdisciplinary work. Her passion in instrument development began as a doctoral student at the University of Rhode Island. She has continued creating instruments to measure communication and therapeutic relationships between providers and patients. Enjoying didactic, clinical, and technological teaching, she is excited to share her years of experience with the present and next generation of nursing faculty.

Moderator: Leslie Graham is Coordinator of the RPN to BScN Bridging Program, and Professor, Nursing/Adjunct Professor at the University of Ontario, Institute of Technology –Durham College (UOIT-DC) Collaborative Nursing Program. Currently a doctoral student at the University of Western Ontario, where her research interests involve faculty development for simulation-based learning in nursing education, Ms. Graham elevates simulation as pedagogy through national and international presentations and publications.  Being a passionate educator, Ms. Graham has received several awards in recognition of excellence in nursing education. As result of early work in simulation-based education, she was the recipient of the American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year.

To register, please visit: https://casn.member365.com/public/event/details/01aa0bd0cfa3afe135467b3e906af8a1157830d3/1

If you have any questions, please contact Julia Thomas, Education Policy Coordinator, by email jthomas@casn.ca