NURS FPX 6116 Assessment 3 Criteria and Rubric Development

Criteria and Rubric Development

Student name

Capella University

NURS-FPX6116

Professor Name

Submission date

Establishing criteria and rubrics for evaluating student learning is crucial to provide and ensure every student has an equal opportunity to be evaluated on their level of learning through assessment. The evaluation of the performance of the nursing student in the “Transition to Professional Nursing Practice” simulation will involve determining the ability of the student to apply a performance assessment with respect to his / her level of ability or competence in terms of the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective (Feeling) measures of learning.

The processes of assessing clinical nursing education offer formalized assessments that allow the documentation of objective evidence that a student has accomplished the competencies, knowledge, skills, and attitudes that qualify and/or support the professional status of a student as a professional nurse (Aase et al., 2022). Clear-cut criteria and rubrics aid the communication of what is expected and how to demonstrate the competencies in the profession.

Part One: Assessment Description and Rationale

Assessment Description and Overview

The trick to competency residencies is effective assessment. In the learning process of how nurses can transition between students and nursing professionals, a simulation-based clinical performance assessment will be used to determine what the residents need to learn better in translating the learning into a course that nurses can use to transition into nursing professionals. This evaluation can be connected to the course learning outcomes since it helps to show that the resident demonstrated good thinking in the evaluation process and he demonstrated good judgment in the evaluation process and in the actual experience with the patient.

According to Vincent et al. (2021), formal clinical education assessment is an objective way to document the accomplishment of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the learner who is engaging in competent nursing. The clinical performance assessment design provides a means of assessing the learning objectives to be achieved in the course based on evidence.

Assembling and Administering the Assessment Tool

Our faculty, clinical, and simulation experts will create an evaluation based on the simulations of practice scenarios (according to National Standards and Clinical Guidelines). The simulations that we shall develop will be based on formal and standardised guidelines that could be tested in hospitals and nursing homes. Students will then make their own assessment during the 6 th week of their course in the HFH Simulation Lab. The evaluation will be done for 3 hours, but untimed, so there will be no pressure for the residents, and they will feel less stressed during their evaluation.

This structured simulation will assist the novice graduates in gaining confidence and ease into being a nurse, as presented in a study by Masso et al. (2022). The process of evaluation of simulation will be divided into a pre-briefing, which will provide an opportunity for the residents to get the goals and behaviours of the simulation, and a post-simulation debriefing of the residents, which will help them advance their learning process and provide insight/reflection based on practices.

Knowledge Gaps in Assessment Administration

The evaluation plan has an excellent base, but since everything is unknown and uncertain, there are several factors that might have a tremendous influence on the evaluation process. Among the largest challenges is the fact that certain residents received a non-constant level of exposure to simulation during their undergraduate studies, which will definitely result in inconsistency in all aspects of the assessment process. Another example of where there may be variation is the competency level of the individual faculty in their competence to facilitate simulation. The various levels of competence among faculty personnel can also lead to different levels of facilitating and assessing the residents in the evaluation process.

Muirhead et al. (2022) posit that the clinical-practice variable inconsistency in nursing students does indeed contribute to the overall challenge of standardising any performance measure with any group of nursing students. To assist in overcoming any of the areas set in the above, it is proposed that in future versions of the process, a faculty calibration session and an opportunity to allow residents to attend simulation reassessment sessions before the assessment tool is initialised, to give all nursing learners the best opportunity of success.

Learning Domains: Cognitive, Psychomotor, and Affective

This assessment aims to evaluate a nurse’s skills to provide a comprehensive assessment of their nursing skills, comparing their nursing practice to QSEN competencies and best practices, regardless of where they live in the country Before the simulation (interaction with a patient partactice simulation), the cognitive learning domain is assessed by having residents complete an alternate case-based analysis test by recording what they would do based on QSEN competencies. As residents play a role in a simulation, the psychomotor learning domain is assessed when the residents complete nursing skills, including performing patient assessment, administering medications, and ensuring patient safety, properly following the best-practice guidelines.

And, following the simulation, the affective learning domain is assessed by asking the residents to report on their emotions, values, and interpersonal skills when communication with members of their health care team occurs. AlRatrout et al. (2025) state that integrating nursing in the evaluation of nursing focusing on QSEN competencies (e.g., patient-and-family-centered care, safety, and collaboration) helps nursing programs design and develop new assessment tools to evaluate the nursing students’ development, thereby aiding in the improvement of nursing and nurse practitioners’ competencies nationwide.

Knowledge Gaps in Domain Assessment

The need to understand the gaps in the assessment/evaluation of the different domains is to ensure that there is a next level of quality and fairness in measurements. One of the areas is the affective domain (values, attitudes, and emotional reactions), which can be highly uncertain because the reactions of the learners to the values, attitudes, and emotional reactions are extremely hard to assess and measure with the help of standardized tools. Likewise, the cognitive domain (measured by having the residents answer a diagnosis before a case scenario) may not be able to capture the complexity of cognition expressed by a graduate when she answered with a process of clinical reasoning when assessing and treating a patient in a constantly changing, dynamic, and complex environment.

To measure clinical competency in practice as indicated by Liaw et al. (2024), will need to use multiple assessment methodologies to examine their competence, rather than using one point (singular) to measure the performance of a graduate; future changes in assessment would therefore need to include either an observation checklist to be used by the faculty or a verification of competency (validation) to minimise subjective measurement and support the overall validity of the assessment.

Performance-Level Criteria and Progression

When various levels of performance are used, the assessment can be conducted in an open and systematic manner, which can be related to the nursing competency. This assignment rubric features four differentiated levels: proficient and basic, and non-performance, and four anchors to describe observable behaviour in relation to the learning objectives in the course. The non-visual grading milestones of Non-Performance to Distinguished are an increment of clinical independence, clinical accuracy, and clinical judgment in executing nursing tasks. The residents would start with the Non-Performance level (where they are not accomplishing tasks) and proceed on to achieve remarkable tasks in a clinical, independent way.

It is assumed that all residents start the course with a foundation of knowledge related to basic nursing concepts and that all residents will continue to develop as/when they develop further towards independent clinical practice throughout their program. Smart and Wall (2023) highlighted that rubric-based assessments (aligned to the AACN Essentials) can offer an educator a way to assess if students are meeting professional nursing standards that are used by many nurses to assess other nursing professionals in their prospective practice places.

Communicating Grading Expectations to Learners

Communication of course grading is extremely important and should be done in a timely manner. This will assist in assuring the success of the learners and a reduction in test anxiety. The grading rubric (i.e., the rubric that will be used to assess) will be made known to the residents during the course orientation (Week 1). Moreover, faculty will explain the rubric verbally during the course orientation to help residents gain an understanding of the terms under which they will ultimately be evaluated. In the course syllabus, residents will also be given the grading rubric. The electronic copy of the rubric will be uploaded into the learning management system of the hospital to guarantee long-lasting access to this rubric throughout the rest of the course.

Recent research has demonstrated that students’ performance in simulation assessments is improved when learners are provided their rubric well in advance of an assessment and when the rubric is discussed with learners prior to an assessment (Elendu et al., 2024) – one additional way we will do this is that, during Week 5 of the course, the faculty will host a dedicated question and answer session(s) for residents to clarify their understanding of the rubric prior to the formal evaluation through simulation in Week 6.

Validity and Reliability of the Assessment

To ensure the validity of the assessment tool used in the pilot, content validity will be verified through reviews by identifying a group of nursing experts (clinical nurse educators and simulation experts) to ensure scenarios and rubric criteria align with the content of the course, the professional standard of practice for nursing practice and to ensure the reliability of the assessment tool through inter-rater reliability to be achieved through procedures that involve two separate raters independently scoring each pilot simulation and then comparing their scores on the pilot simulations; before the pilot simulations can be used for official administrative purposes.

Hyun et al. (2022) suggest standardisation and formalisation of new graduate nurses’ competency assessment tools to ensure that the competency of the new graduate nurses has been assessed in a reliable and valid manner. Subsequent actions will involve ensuring that an annual review of both the faculty and the review of the results and the interpretation of the outcome of the simulation that assesses whether conducting the simulation and viewing the results fulfilled or did not satisfactorily meet the standard of competency and professionalism in nursing care.

Part Two: Grading Rubric

Course: Transition to Professional Nursing Practice

Learner: Alem AT

Faculty: Professor Name

Date: April 5, 2026

Conclusion

The success of a nurse residency program will require that there be effective evaluation and the development of rubrics. It is evident that there are a few competencies that are intertwined with nursing practice, and the completion of a nurse residency program can be measured by the same competency model, but not necessarily all nurse residency programs. To design an assessment of proficiency for the “Transition to Professional Nursing Practice (TPN) course, it was important to develop a simulation-based clinical performance assessment.

The simulation performance evaluation is created according to the multi-domain approach to measure the competency of three domains of the learning process: cognitive (thinking), psychomotor (doing), and affective (feeling). In that way, the simulation clinical performance evaluation is being designed in partnership with experts, performed in a guided simulation, and announced far ahead of time to the residents, to ensure fair evaluation.

For the Next (4th) Assessment of this class visit: NURS FPX 6116 Assessment 4