Background:

Nurses who practice in the 21^st century must be equipped with the knowledge, abilities, skills and values that will ensure their success in the complex, ever-changing world of health care. They must know about human beings, caring for individuals and families with a range of health problems, health promotion and disease prevention, and professional issues. But knowledge is not enough. Nurses also must have a variety of abilities and skills including the following: managing technologies of patient care; making decisions, particularly in ambiguous, uncertain and unpredictable situations; thinking critically and reflectively; setting priorities; managing large amounts of information; and working collaboratively on interdisciplinary teams. But even this is not enough. Nurses who practice in the 21st century also must be very clear about their own values, how values influence one’s decisions and the priorities one sets, how to manage the ethical dilemmas they encounter in practice, how to be accepting of the diversity of human beings, and their responsibility to uphold and advance the values of the nursing profession, among other things. Thus, the practice of nursing involves all three domains of learning -- cognitive, psychomotor and affective. The education of nurses for any role, therefore, must attend to all three domains of learning, and faculty need to be prepared to evaluate student learning in all three domains. Historically, however, nursing education has focused on the cognitive and psychomotor domains, and in recent years, the cognitive domain has taken on even greater prominence as faculty worry about NCLEX pass rates and “covering content” that grows exponentially on almost a moment-by-moment basis. The Evaluation of Learning Advisory Council (ELAC) believes it is time for faculty to attend to and re-focus energies on all three domains of learning as they design curricula, implement various teaching strategies, and evaluate learning. This Task Group has been created to address the assessment and evaluation of student learning in all domains.

Purpose of the Task Group:

The purpose of this task group is to propose methods that will help faculty in all types of educational programs (practical nurse, associate degree, diploma, baccalaureate, masters and doctoral) design, use, and evaluate evidence-based strategies to assess and evaluate student learning in all domains (cognitive, psychomotor, and affective).

Specific Tasks to be Completed:

1. Complete a comprehensive review of the literature related to the assessment and evaluation of student learning across all domains (cognitive, psychomotor, and affective).
2. Complete a critical synthesis of research and other scholarly evidence related to the assessment of student learning in all domains (cognitive, psychomotor, and affective).
3. Submit this critical synthesis to Nursing Education Perspectives for possible publication.
4. Collaborate with the ELAC Task Group on Evaluating Student Learning in Classroom, Laboratory, and Clinical Settings to prepare a position statement for submission to the NLN Board of Governors regarding the assessment and evaluation of student learning (a) in classroom, laboratory, and clinical settings and (b) in all domains of learning, including the use of standardized testing in nursing education.
5. Propose strategies that will assist nursing faculty teaching in all types of programs to appropriately and effectively use innovative approaches to assessing and evaluating student learning in the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains.
6. Add information about assessing and evaluating student learning in all domains to NLN’s literature database in order to expand the repository of evidence on this topic.
7. Monitor an electronic community on the topic of assessing and evaluating student learning in all domains of learning.

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