STUDENT EVALUATION OF CLINICAL EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT

healthcare programs, school nursing, clinic or physician offices, home health / hospice, and
specialty care units in the hospital environment. Even after grouping the cell sizes were not
equivalent, with the number of respondents in each site group varying from 4 to 26. The median
number of respondents per site group cells was 8.
Initial analysis consisted of four ANOVAs with site group as the independent variable
and scale score as the dependent variable. Although all F ratios were significant at p < .01,
indicating that scale scores differed according to clinical group, the Levene Statistic for
Homogeneity of Variance was violated for tests on two of the four scales (Communication /
Feedback and Learning Opportunities). Therefore, the additional grouping variable of institution
was used, and separate ANOVAs were run for each institution, resulting in 12 separate analyses.
The MANOVA procedure was not used for testing as the dependent variables (scale scores) were
found to be fairly highly correlated. The Dunnett T3 test was used for all post hoc analyses, as
some ANOVA tests violated the Homogeneity of Variance assumption. ANOVA statistics are
presented in Table 11 and scale means and standard deviations by clinical site group appear in
Table 12.
Results indicated that there were significant differences in scale scores according to
clinical site groups. For the SMW institution, ANOVA results were significant for all but one
scale score (Learning Opportunities). Significant differences between student evaluations of
clinical sites were found for the Communication and Feedback Scale F (6. 54) = 3.41, p < .01.
Post Hoc comparisons of SMW data indicated that students rated the Communication / Feedback
of clinical site group 5 more positively (M = 9.00) than site group 1 (M = 15.89), site group 2 (M
= 15.20), and site group 7(M = 15.29), p < .05. Differences between site groups were also found
for the Learning Support scale F (6, 54) = 3.46, p < .01. SMW students rated the Learning
68