The volumes in this popular series provide nurse educators with material to help them plan, conduct, and evaluate their instructional goals and accomplishments. The series addresses a broad spectrum of teaching situations, classroom settings, and clinical instruction-supervision. At some time or another all teachers are faced with the need to measure and evaluate learning in a course, workshop, continuing education program, or educational setting. This book is a complete and very practical guide to student evaluation. Readers will learn how to: apply the concepts of measurement, evaluation, and testing in nursing education; plan for classroom testing, create and administer tests, and analyze test results; and assess clinical competencies.

The second edition of Assessment for Excellence arrives as higher education enters a new era of the accountability movement. In the face of mandates such as results-based funding and outcomes-based accreditation, institutions and assessment specialists are feeling increasingly pressured to demonstrate accountability to external constituencies. The practice of assessment under these new accountability pressures takes on special significance for the education of students and the development of talent across the entire higher education system. This book introduces a talent development approach to educational assessment as a counter to prevailing philosophies, illustrating how contemporary practices are unable to provide institutions with meaningful data with which to improve educational outcomes. It provides administrators, policymakers, researchers, and analysts with a comprehensive framework for developing new assessment programs to promote talent development and for scrutinizing existing policies and practices. Written for a wide audience, the book enables the lay reader to quickly grasp the imperatives of a properly-designed assessment program, and also to gain adequate statistical understanding necessary for examining current or planned assessment policies. More advanced readers will appreciate the technical appendix for assistance in conducting statistical analyses that align with a talent development approach. In addition, institutional researchers will benefit from sections that outline the development of appropriate student databases.