STUDENT EVALUATION OF CLINICAL EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT

the Department Atmosphere scale, and item 23 (“site provided an atmosphere conducive to
learning”) was moved from the Learning Opportunities scale to the Department Atmosphere
scale. This temporary moving of items within-scales left all scales with between six and nine
items.
After changing the placement of these four items, correlation coefficients were
recalculated. The result was standardized alpha levels for all scales of above .75 (see Table 20
for revised scale correlation coefficients). The revision of item placement increased the
Department Atmosphere reliability by .14. However, the change resulted in a decrease of .05 in
the Learning Opportunities scale reliability. The Learning Support and Communication /
Feedback scales were almost unchanged, being calculated at .01 and .02 lower than with the
original item placement. Overall, reliabilities were higher with the revised item placements. It
may be beneficial to consider using the revised item placements for further investigations using
the SECEE inventory. In addition, expanding the inventory to include some of the issues that
students raised in discussion of the aspects of the clinical environment that helped and hindered
learning may further improve reliability of the four scales.
The additional reliability measure of test-retest scale score correlations was calculated for a
sample of 46 students from SMA and SMW institutions. Test-retest correlations were found to
be significant at p < .001. Although not as high as might be expected (r value varied from .50 to
.61 for the four scales), the reader must bear in mind that the student respondents had
experienced several additional clinical sessions at the clinical site between the pretest and end of
semester inventory. These additional experiences may have significantly impacted the
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