NUR 673 Module 8 Paper: Reflection on Learning Example

From Grading to Evidence: A Reflection on My Growth as a Nurse Educator Across a Course on Assessment and Evaluation

Student Name

Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, Arizona State University

NUR 673: Producing and Evaluating Programs for Academic and Practice Settings

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

From Grading to Evidence: A Reflection on My Growth as a Nurse Educator Across a Course on Assessment and Evaluation

Introduction

At the start of NUR 673, assessment looked to me like the final step of teaching: write the exam, grade it, post the scores. Two months on, I see it as the evidence that tells me whether the rest of my teaching worked. Reflection, as nursing education uses it, is a deliberate look at experience to change future practice (Billings & Halstead, 2024). This paper describes three experiences in the course that changed my practice and the commitments that follow from them.

Turning Point 1: Auditing My Own Exam

The first paper asked what meaningful assessment looks like. When I sorted my unit exam by cognitive level, I found that more than half of the items asked students to recall facts, although my outcome asked them to analyze. I had believed my exams were rigorous because they were difficult. I learned that difficulty and validity are not the same thing; a recall item about an obscure value can be hard and still tell me nothing about clinical reasoning (Oermann et al., 2024). Building a blueprint before writing items felt slow at first, but it is the only way I now trust my exams to match what I teach.

Turning Point 2: Having My Items Reviewed

Posting my draft items for peer review was uncomfortable. A classmate pointed out that my acid-base case named the type of imbalance in the stem and that one select-all item had every option correct. I had written dozens of items like these over the past year. Receiving critique helped me understand how students experience flawed items, and giving critique made me read my own items more carefully. I now see peer review of exams as a professional norm worth bringing to my department, not an exercise for coursework.

Turning Point 3: Seeing a Course Through Its Data

The course evaluation case asked me to read student ratings, item statistics, standardized test results and clinical feedback together. I realized that I had been reading student ratings in isolation and dismissing low scores on exam fairness as complaints. When the item statistics in the case pointed in the same direction, I understood that students were telling faculty something true. Evaluation works when sources are read together and lead to changes that are measured afterward.

Growth in the Educator Role

Across these experiences, my sense of my role has changed. I came to nursing education as an expert clinician and assumed that clinical expertise would make me a good evaluator of students. The course showed me that evaluation is its own area of expertise, with methods, evidence and ethical obligations, especially fairness to students whose progression depends on my judgments. The NLN's scope of practice for academic nurse educators lists assessment and evaluation among the core competencies of the role (Christensen & Simmons, 2020), and the reason is now clear to me.

Commitments

First, I will blueprint every exam I write next term and share the blueprint with students. Second, I will review item statistics after each exam and revise or remove items with negative discrimination before scores are final. Third, I will propose a peer review process for exams in my course team, starting with an exchange of two exams per term.

Conclusion

I began the course seeing assessment as a task and finish it seeing it as evidence and a responsibility. The three commitments above are small, practical steps, and I will judge my growth by whether they are still part of my practice a year from now.

References

Billings, D. M., & Halstead, J. A. (Eds.). (2024). Teaching in nursing: A guide for faculty (7th ed.). Elsevier.

Christensen, L. S., & Simmons, L. E. (2020). The scope of practice for academic nurse educators and academic clinical nurse educators (3rd ed.). National League for Nursing.

Oermann, M. H., Gaberson, K. B., & De Gagne, J. C. (Eds.). (2024). Evaluation and testing in nursing education (7th ed.). Springer Publishing.