Evaluation of an Internship Assessment Grid for Francophone Physical and Health Education Student Interns

The objective of the present study is to analyze four metric qualities of an assessment grid for internship placements used by professionals to evaluate a sample of 110 Franco-Ontarian student interns registered between 2006 and 2009 at Laurentian University in the School of Human Kinetics. The evaluation grid was composed of 26 criteria. The four metric qualities that were analyzed were: the degree of difficulty, the degree of discrimination, the internal consistency, and the concurrent validity. Each intern's performance was assessed by three individuals: the professional supervisor, the intern (self-assessment) and the university professor who coordinates the internship placement. The analysis of the three assessments based on the Education Testing Service Method indicates that the assessment of the professional supervisors and intern self-assessment are too high (difficulty index, p(i) = 20) and produced a discrimination power of zero between the interns (discrimination index, D-i = 0). The analysis of the internal consistency of the criteria indicates that a number are too highly interrelated (Cronbach's alpha = 0.97) and that ten criteria can be removed from the evaluation grid, as they are redundant. Concurrent validity, determined by calculating three correlations between the three dimensions of the evaluation grid (before, during, and after the teaching session) and the overall rating of the intern, was demonstrated insofar as the lowest correlation between the assessment of the intern's performance and the measurement criterion (overall rating of the intern's performance) was significant (r (106) =.76, p <.001).