Papers and Essays Writing with Concept Mapping Their Advantages, Disadvantages or Issues As Outcome Evaluation Strategy In Nursing Evaluation

Outcome Evaluation Strategy In Nursing Evaluation for Papers and Essays Writing With Concept Mapping Their Advantages, Disadvantages or Issues

Papers and Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy In Nursing Education, Advantages of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy, Disadvantages of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy, Issues of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy, Concept Mapping As Outcome Evaluation Strategy In Nursing Education, Advantages of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy, Disadvantages of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy, Issues of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy.

Papers and Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy In Nursing Education 

    Papers and assigned essays or essay questions on examinations can be used to demonstrate organizational skills, critical thinking, clinical reasoning, and written communication while encouraging creativity. Papers are written reports, whereas essays are free-form responses to open-ended questions. 

    Students are encouraged to be creative in responding to essay questions. Both papers and essays can measure the affective domain, as well as higher levels of the cognitive domain.

Advantages of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy

    In-depth information can be obtained through the writing of papers. This helps students clarify their own thinking about topics and learn to write better. Papers are a public work and can be assessed by others in the profession. Writing papers requires students to integrate their ideas with those found in other sources. 

    Similarly, essays are useful for assessing higher-level cognitive skills such as analysis and synthesis. Using essay questions in a testing environment has the advantage that essay questions are easier to construct than multiple-choice examination questions. 

    It is important to make the essay question clearly understood and focused; providing the grading criteria to students will help them allocate their response time more effectively during the testing session (Davis, 2009). Essay tests can demonstrate the ability of the student to synthesize material they have learned and convey their ideas clearly without the benefit of resources.

Disadvantages of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy

    The major disadvantage of papers for both students and faculty is the amount of time involved in writing and grading. Faculty can become distracted from the content of the paper when a student exhibits poor writing skill. As well, faculty feedback may be more focused on supporting the grade assigned even when faculty states their belief that the purpose of feedback is to improve students' skill acquisition (Li & Barnard, 2011). 

    Providing constructive comments can be accomplished through facilitative comments by posting questions versus being authoritative. Davis (2009) suggests using the question, “What do you hope your reader will understand your thesis to be?” instead of a directive statement such as “State your thesis more clearly” (p. 328). Faculty should also avoid the temptation to rewrite the paper while they are grading. An essay test may involve less sampling of the content than a multiple-choice examination.

Issues of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy

    Reliability in grading papers is an issue. Reliability can be increased by having clearly established grading criteria and having more than one person grade the paper. This is especially important for papers that receive low or failing grades. Anonymous grading can increase the objectivity of the grader. Faculty should determine the assessment plan based on the purpose of the paper and desired outcomes. 

   For example, if the purpose is to demonstrate critical thinking and creativity, the format of the paper may have less value in the overall grade of the paper. Alternatively, if the purpose is for the student to demonstrate scholarly writing, evaluation may emphasize the format and style of writing. Writing a clear and focused essay question can be a challenge for faculty. 

    The question needs to be stated in such a way that the scope is clear to the students. It is also important to follow a test plan when essay tests are constructed so that the content is adequately sampled. Before grading an essay examination, faculty must establish clear grading criteria. 

    When more than one person is grading, interrater reliability needs to be established. Time required to answer the essay should be determined. Davis (2009) suggests providing approximately twice the amount of time for students to provide their answer in a testing environment as it takes for the faculty member to write out the answer to the essay.

Concept Mapping As Outcome Evaluation Strategy In Nursing Education

    Description and Uses Concept, mind, and nursing process mapping are all descriptive terms applied to a strategy in which students' express concepts and their relationships in a visual format. This strategy uses a visual means for students to demonstrate how they organize information, understand complex relationships, and integrate theoretical knowledge into practice (Harrison & Gibbons, 2013; George, Geethakrishnan , & D'Souza, 2014). 

    Concept mapping is frequently used as an alternative to traditional nursing care plans as a method for students to demonstrate their understanding of the underpinnings that guide the delivery of nursing care. Multiple problems can be incorporated into a patient oriented concept map, allowing students to demonstrate the interrelationship of the problems to patient care (Harrison & Gibbons, 2013).

    The concepts to be mapped can be provided by the faculty, generated by the students, or determined by the unique patient care they represent. The structure can be defined or left open to student creativity. A number of computer-based programs are available for constructing concept maps, and are useful for online environments. 

    Using electronic maps allows each piece of the concept map to be hyperlinked to a resource. This application of concept mapping is called a concept resource map. When concept mapping is used for evaluation, the purpose of the assignment drives the criteria. 

    For example, criteria may include such things as a content analysis (the number of items included), the clarity of the organizational structure, accuracy of relationships, and categorization of content. It is possible to have students self assess or peer assess concept maps as a way of building the professional skills of self-assessment and peer assessment.

Advantages of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy

    Concept mapping requires students to demonstrate cognitive synthesis skills with a minimum of writing. Mapping also allows faculty to gain insight into the way students assimilate new information and how students are connecting the material. 

   Mapping also lends itself well to assessment, especially in determining the way students view relationships. Having students verbally explain the concept map can add clarity to their understanding of the relationships expressed by the lines on the map.

Disadvantages of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy

    The concept map may be large and difficult to follow. It can also be more challenging to interpret the student's intent because only key words and phrases are used. It is possible that the artistic ability and overall appearance of the map, much like handwriting, could influence faculty. 

    For digital concept maps, special software is required. Time required for both students and faculty to learn the program needs to be acknowledged. Time involved in reading and responding to concept maps can be lengthy.

Issues of Essays Writing As Outcome Evaluation Strategy

    The faculty must teach students how to successfully create a map and allow them practice in completing maps before using this as an evaluation strategy. By practicing the mapping strategy as an in-class learning experience, the students will have a greater familiarity with the process. 

    This becomes an active learning strategy when small groups work on a concept map during class time and then share their maps with peers. Using the evaluation rubric to provide peer feedback not only provides the students an opportunity to practice feedback, it familiarizes them with the expectations of the assignment. Special software can improve the capabilities of concept mapping in an electronic environment. 

    Software to support concept mapping can add a learning curve for students. Regardless of the method used to construct the map, a limitation of mapping is the challenge of uncovering the rationale for the relationship of ideas. One way of addressing this limitation is to use the map as the focus for a faculty student conference. 

   The grading of the exercise can easily become subjective unless clear criteria for grading are established. These criteria should be defined for the students before submission of their work. Faculty need to establish the validity and reliability of their tools for this strategy.