NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: North Slave Region

Tags: social sciences, education, ethnography, nursing

Objective(s): The 2004 Collaborative Nursing Program Conference revealed that evaluating and making decisions to promote or fail student nurses is wrought with many contradictions that are not well understood. This research is proposed in response to understanding how professional beliefs and practices are embedded into evaluation efforts, and involves a consortium of schools of nursing in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. The aims of the research centre on exploring the evaluation work of students and instructors in a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program to understand how it happens that evaluation efforts seem threatening and adversarial to students and instructors alike in what is purported to be a caring or relational curriculum with formal systems in place to ensure transparency, due process and practice competence. This licence covers the implementation of the study at Aurora College (Yellowknife Campus).

Project Description: The activities to determine student mastery of tasks to meet established standards of professional competence have not been well described and are poorly understood. This research is intended to illuminate the activities that contribute to decisions about a student’s progress, to understand how professional beliefs and practices are embedded into evaluation efforts, and to explicate some of the tensions that these practices generate. The research will employ an Institutional Ethnography (IE) approach, which entails a particular way of conceptualizing how educational institutions, professions and employment work. In this study, IE will serve as a conceptual frame to treat student evaluation and promotion as a social product of actions. Evaluation and promotion of nursing students is coordinated work, often relying on and linked by texts (e.g., practice appraisal forms, grade entry forms, student transcripts, promotion policies, appeal procedures, etc.). The study will investigate, through IE, what variously positioned people do in negotiating student evaluation, promotion and/or failure. IE is as much a method as it is a process; therefore, it is impossible to lay out precisely the parameters of the research, or to predict which subjects will be observed or the questions they will be asked. Each step builds on what has been discovered in previous phases of the research (i.e., note-taking, textual analysis and interviews). Depending on the research findings, the team may seek additional approval to conduct participant observations and interviews that actively involve students. Research activities proposed include: 1) Instructors noting descriptions of the evaluation activities they engage in. These descriptions will focus on processes and procedures followed to ensure due process. The notes will include any interactions where student progress is discussed. Activities related to appeals or human rights issues (such as accommodation for disabilities) will be detailed. Professional meetings where standards are established, nursing competencies are developed, registration exams are developed and so forth will be described. The focus at this stage is on the work/thinking processes that faculty undertake (not case analysis), which is centred on explicating the tensions between policies and practices that inform evaluation. 2) The research team conducting textual analysis on documents which contribute to student evaluation. The analysis will focus on how people activate specific texts, that is, when texts enter evaluation work, and where and how they are used. The focus will not be on gathering details of any specific occasion of student evaluation but rather on how the generic text operates within the larger evaluation promotion regime. Evaluation forms and processes will be identified and instructors will be interviewed to explain how the text is interpreted and used to coordinate evaluation. 3) The research team conducting interviews with nursing faculty and related professional colleagues. The interviews will focus on detailed descriptions of the work of student evaluation. Interview questions will be generated from the note-taking phase of the research. Questions asked will not be about specific situations but will focus on instructors’ contributions to evaluation. Posters will be put up in the Nursing Department to announce the research and the identity of the researchers. The posters will also inform people what processes will be adhered to in providing for the protection of privacy. Faculty not wishing to be included in the note-taking phase of the research will be asked to indicate their refusal to the researchers. Faculty who decide to participate in the research will be responsible for describing the research to any students they may be working with. The students will be asked to give written consent before their interactions with the instructors involved in the study are noted. The consent will outline that each student agrees to faculty keeping notes about the activities and processes surrounding evaluation. No data will be gathered that relates to any student who has refused participation in the note-taking phase of the research. Pseudonyms will be used in all notes and every possible effort will be made to avoid identification of specific incidents with specific students and/or faculty. The results of the study will be presented at nursing departmental meetings, the Collaboration for Academic Education in Nursing annual meetings, and in journals. Copies of any publications stemming from this research will be deposited at the Aurora Research Institute library. The study will be carried out at Aurora College (Yellowknife Campus) from January 1 to December 31, 2007.