Effect of Objective Structured Clinical Examination on Nursing Students' Clinical Skills

Considering the daily increasing changes in clinical training approaches, the necessity of using new evaluation methods in proportion with these approaches is also becoming more and more obvious for measuring all of the cognitive, emotional and psychomotor dimensions of students. The present study was designed and conducted for reviewing the effect of objective structured clinical examination method on the clinical skills of nursing students. In this quasi-experimental study, 48 nursing students have participated that were randomly assigned to two groups of intervention and control. The intervention group students were evaluated at the end of educational period of their clinical skills and principles course using objective structured clinical examination (OSCE). The OSCE included five core skills in this course: assessing and fulfilling patients' basic needs, dressing up, injectable drug therapy, non-injectable drug therapy, infection control. The control group students were evaluated using the routine method. Both groups of students were followed up in the next semester and were compared in terms of learning enhancement in these five skills. Evaluation of procedures was based on valid and reliable check-lists made by the researcher. Results were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (Chi-square, independent and paired T tests). The mean score of the final evaluation in the intervention group was significantly higher than that of the control group (P=0.000). Final evaluation scores of the intervention group students showed a better performance than their previous semester (P=0.000), while the final evaluation scores of the control group students showed a lack of progress in their skills (P<0.05). It seems that this evaluation method also is a support for students' learning and resulted in improvement of clinical skills among them. Accordingly, it is recommended that nursing education centers apply this method to assess students' clinical skills in conjunction with other methods, to help promote their learning.