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Transcript for Rewriting the Mark Scheme:
Using an Analytical Mark Scheme with Level 6 Nursing Students
Jeremy Finch: My name's Jeremy Finch, I am a senior lecturer here in the Department of Nursing and I've worked at MMU since 2004 part-time and now full-time for the last few years. Traditionally we assess the nurses using either essays or presentations and mentors normally assess the assessment of the clinical skills within clinical practice. We wanted to assess their skills using a different method so we assessed their clinical skills here in an environment like this, which is a high-fidelity environment with this mannequin breathing and with all his observations and the alarms bleeping. The nurses will come in they will be given a scenario.
Assessor: Okay Jed you are working as a staff nurse on an orthopaedic ward and you have been asked to review this patient called Sean.
JF: They will be asked to repeat this scenario back.
Assessor: So we've got a chap called Sean who is 31, who had a repair of his left patella tendon'
JF: And then they will work through that scenario and they will make decisions about the patient's care and decide what they need to do.
Nurse: Sean, hello, my name's Jed, I'm one of the staff nurses, I thought I'd come and see how you were doing.
Patient: I'm so thirsty.
Nurse: You're feeling thirsty at the moment are you?
JF: They will go through a full assessment on that patient. They go through airway, breathing, circulation, assess the level of consciousness and have a quick, good look at them top to toe and they have to go through and make a full assessment and deicide what they're going to do - come up with a management plan as well. That will take about 10-15 minutes to go through and they will be assessed using criteria and reference criteria, tick box if they are safe and if we think they should pass or not based on that. Are they a safe practitioner? Are they competent? That will be the first part of that assessment.
We decided to give them 20 minutes after they'd done their assessment to go away and think about what they'd done and why they'd done it. We told them the questions we were going to ask them beforehand. We gave them five questions, the first one related to their understanding of the patient’s condition and the pathophysiology behind that condition so we made sure they had the underpinning knowledge and the subsequent questions asked them about why they made certain decisions. It allowed us to probe the knowledge, ask them about their evidence, underpin their decision-making and probe their critical thinking… Were they thinking about critically about it? Why did they make those decisions? What were the professional issues involved and how did they evaluate what had happened? They had about 20-25 minutes of questioning, five questions, two tutors sat together and we went through and asked them these questions and the outcome was very good.
The feedback from the students was generally very good. They felt that it was assessing them doing their job, which is what they liked. Some of the comments, I think out of 11 students 9 fed back, there was probably about 4 or 5 comments saying that it was better than an essay. They preferred it to an essay because they were able to elaborate and discuss what was going on and they were able to be in this environment and this context and that worked really well for them. I don't think it should be a standalone. I think we also need to have people who can write well and we need people who can do presentations and communicate that way but I think as part of the overall assessment strategy I think it has many benefits. So from those points of view I see it being a Eureka moment for us; that's what it was.