STUDENT EVALUATION OF CLINICAL EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT

Institutional Differences in Student Response to the SECEE Instrument. Prior to
reliability determination for both the SECEE instrument as a whole and for the four
predetermined scales, it was necessary to determine whether there were differences between the
institutions in terms of respondent scale scores. Calculations of four ANOVAs were completed,
using the institution as the independent variable and the four calculated scale scores as the
dependent variables. A random sample of 35 completed inventories from each institution was
used for analysis. No violation of the homogeneity of variance assumption was detected via the
Levene’s Statistic method (Norusis, 1997). Institution specific and overall scale score means and
standard deviations are reported in Table 3. Significant differences in scale scores were found
between institutions for all four scales: Communication / Feedback F (2, 102) = 8.17, p < .01;
Learning Opportunities F (2, 102) = 4.49, p < .05; Learning Support F (2, 102) = 8.40, p < .01;
and Department Atmosphere F (2, 102) = 4.70, p < .05. Results of the ANOVA analysis are
presented in Table 4.
Multiple comparisons were calculated using the Dunnett T3 method (Lomax, 1992) and a
significance level of p < .05. These results revealed that for the Communication and Feedback
scale, students attending SMW rated their clinical sites more positively (M = 11.06) than did
students attending both LMA (M = 14.99) and SMA (M = 13.78). Students attending SMW
institution also rated the Learning Opportunities at their clinical sites more positively (M =
13.11) than did students at LMA did (M = 16.47). Learning Support at the clinical site was rated
higher by students at SMA (M = 13.33) and students at SMW (M = 14.68) than by students at
LMA (M = 17.13). Finally, students at SMA rated the department atmosphere at their clinical
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