STUDENT EVALUATION OF CLINICAL EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT

end of semester perception of the learning environment. In addition, test-retest reliability results
are generally somewhat lower than internal consistency measures (Kubiszyn & Borich, 1987).
The investigator believes that the level and significance of the test-retest correlations are
sufficiently high, given the potential effect of additional exposure to the environment between
testing occasions.
Research Question 3
Is the revised SECEE inventory able to differentiate between various student populations through
evaluations of their clinical learning environments?
Construct Validity. As was presented in the Results section, significant differences
between student sub-populations were found for all scale scores, using institution as the
independent variable. Generally, students attending the two smaller institutions evaluated their
clinical education environments more positively than did students attending the larger institution.
If the SECEE inventory was focused on evaluating the classroom environment, one might expect
these findings, with larger classrooms being generally noted to be less personal and perhaps less
positively perceived. However, as the clinical setting was the focus of the SECEE instrument
and the clinical groups at the three institutions were similar in size, the differences found were
most likely not due to the impersonal nature of the larger institution. This finding would be
interesting to investigate further, to determine whether some aspect of the clinical environments
at the smaller institutions has a more positive effect on students’ perceptions of the learning
environment.
In addition, differences in scale scores were found between academic levels of students.
At LMA, significant differences were found for all of the scale scores, and there were significant
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