STUDENT EVALUATION OF CLINICAL EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT

6. Add a fifth response item to the demographic item related to identification of the staff
resource person at the clinical site, indicating that the student was not formally assigned a
resource person, but the RN assigned to the same patient as the student served as an
informal student resource.
7. Use different student populations for data collection in repeated measure comparisons
and single administration clinical site comparisons, to reduce the need for student
identification of their inventories and hopefully improve accurate identification of clinical
education sites.
The above changes would result in a net effect of the addition of 3 items to the current 29
forced-choice items. The only foreseeable difficulty with the addition of three items to the
inventory is that it would require a three rather than a two-page format, which may result in
student perception that the instrument will take a lengthy time to complete. However, if the
administrator of the inventory mentions that students should be able to complete the instrument
in about 10 minutes, there should not be any significant negative effects from item expansion.
Study Limitations
During the research process a few issues were recognized that either limit ability to draw
conclusions based on the data or to generalize results to other nursing student populations.
Group (pooled) data constituted the unit of analysis for most of the quantitative testing. The
grouping of students from distinct clinical sites for the purposes of ANOVA testing most likely
masked individual extremes in responses.
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