High school health-education teachers' perceptions and practices related to teaching HIV prevention.

BACKGROUND: HIV/AIDS is one of the leading causes of illness and death in the United States with individuals between the ages of 13 and 19 years being especially vulnerable for infection. The purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes, perceptions, and instructional practices of high school health teachers toward teaching HIV prevention. METHODS: A total of 800 surveys were sent to a national random sample of high school health teachers and 50% responded. RESULTS: There was almost complete agreement (99%) among respondents that HIV prevention instruction is needed. The factors that emerged as significantly influencing the attitudes and perceptions of high school health teachers about teaching HIV prevention were related to teacher preparation, training, and years of experience teaching health education. A state mandate requiring HIV prevention instruction was significantly associated with higher teacher efficacy expectations and more perceived benefits, but did not have a significant influence in relation to practices in the classroom. Characteristics of high school health teachers that were significantly related to attitudes, perceptions, and instructional practices included the instructor's age, sex, and race/ethnicity. CONCLUSIONS: High school health teachers who reported the least experience teaching health education had the least supportive attitudes, perceived the most barriers, and had the lowest efficacy and outcome expectations related to teaching about HIV prevention. Whereas these findings support the importance of teacher preparation and training, they also suggest that more recent college graduates may not be fully prepared to provide effective instruction in HIV prevention.

A standardized rubric to evaluate student presentations.

OBJECTIVE: To design, implement, and assess a rubric to evaluate student presentations in a capstone doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) course. DESIGN: A 20-item rubric was designed and used to evaluate student presentations in a capstone fourth-year course in 2007-2008, and then revised and expanded to 25 items and used to evaluate student presentations for the same course in 2008-2009. Two faculty members evaluated each presentation. ASSESSMENT: The Many-Facets Rasch Model (MFRM) was used to determine the rubric's reliability, quantify the contribution of evaluator harshness/leniency in scoring, and assess grading validity by comparing the current grading method with a criterion-referenced grading scheme. In 2007-2008, rubric reliability was 0.98, with a separation of 7.1 and 4 rating scale categories. In 2008-2009, MFRM analysis suggested 2 of 98 grades be adjusted to eliminate evaluator leniency, while a further criterion-referenced MFRM analysis suggested 10 of 98 grades should be adjusted. CONCLUSION: The evaluation rubric was reliable and evaluator leniency appeared minimal. However, a criterion-referenced re-analysis suggested a need for further revisions to the rubric and evaluation process.

An instrument to objectively measure pharmacist professionalism as an outcome: a pilot study.

BACKGROUND: Historically, academic success has been a major outcome for evaluating the effectiveness of pharmacy education programs and admission criteria. In other words, students' overall grades and/or specific course grades have determined academic success. However, there is a disconnection between students' grades and their performance during practicums or in practice. It was postulated that professionalism might be an alternative outcome for measuring graduates' abilities. OBJECTIVE: To construct an objective measure of professional attitudes and behaviours for recently graduated pharmacists. METHODS: A self-report instrument was developed using the American Board of Internal Medicine's 6-tenet definition of professionalism. Four months after completing the doctor of pharmacy degree (PharmD), pharmacists were asked to complete an online version of the professionalism instrument. The Rasch Measurement Model (Winsteps, Chicago, Illinois) was used to construct a measure from the responses. Using data that fit the model, the Rasch Measurement Model can build the interval-level measurements needed for future inferential statistical interpretations of ordinal-level data gathered with this instrument. RESULTS: Twenty-seven PharmD graduates completed the 15-item instrument. The Rasch Measurement Model was used to construct continuous, linear measures of pharmacist professionalism from these instrument rating scale data. Most of the scales functioned without modification, but 2 of the scales functioned only after being collapsed. One person and one item "misfit" the Rasch Measurement Model and were omitted from the analysis. After these adjustments, the data fit the model well. As a measurement tool, this instrument was overwhelmingly unidimensional; the linear model explained 99.9% of the variation in the data using principal contrast analysis. Item separation was 3.64 logits, person separation was 2.31 logits, and reliability was 0.93 by Cronbach's α. CONCLUSION: The Rasch Measurement Model was used to construct an objective measure of pharmacists' professionalism. The results of this pilot project suggest a promising outcome measure for evaluating pharmacy graduates soon after completion of university.

Magnitude estimation and categorical rating scaling in social sciences: a theoretical and psychometric controversy.

This paper revisits a half-century long theoretical controversy associated with the use of magnitude estimation scaling (MES) and category rating scaling (CRS) procedures in measurement. The MES procedure in this study involved instructing participants to write a number that matched their impression of difficulty of a test item. Participants were not restricted in the range of numbers they could choose for their scale. They also had the choice of disclosing their individual scale. After the MES task was completed, participants were given a blank copy of the test to rate the perceived difficulty of each item using a researcher-imposed categorical rating scale from 1 (very easy) to 6 (very difficult). The MES and CRS data were both analyzed using Rasch Rating scale model. Additionally, the MES data were examined with Rasch Partial Credit model. Results indicate that knowing each person's scale is associated with smaller errors of measurement.

Deconstructing therapy outcome measurement with Rasch analysis of a measure of general clinical distress: the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised.

Rasch analysis was used to illustrate the usefulness of item-level analyses for evaluating a common therapy outcome measure of general clinical distress, the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R; Derogatis, 1994). Using complementary therapy research samples, the instrument's 5-point rating scale was found to exceed clients' ability to make reliable discriminations and could be improved by collapsing it into a 3-point version (combining scale points 1 with 2 and 3 with 4). This revision, in addition to removing 3 misfitting items, increased person separation from 4.90 to 5.07 and item separation from 7.76 to 8.52 (resulting in alphas of .96 and .99, respectively). Some SCL-90-R subscales had low internal consistency reliabilities; SCL-90-R items can be used to define one factor of general clinical distress that is generally stable across both samples, with two small residual factors.

Equating student satisfaction measures.

Colleges and universities conduct student satisfaction studies for many important policy making reasons. However the differences in instrumentation and the use of students' self-reported ratings of satisfaction makes such decisions sample-, instrument-, and institution-dependent. A common metric of student satisfaction would assist decision makers by providing a richness of information not typically obtained. The present study investigated the extent to which two nationally known instruments of student satisfaction could be scaled on the same quantitative metric. Pseudo-common item equating (Fisher, 1997) based on five link items of low and high endorsability enabled comparisons of "similar, but not identical items, from different instruments, calibrated on different samples" (p. 87). Results suggest that both instruments measured similar constructs and could be reasonably used to create a single, common metric. While samples used in the experiment were less than ideal, results clearly demonstrated the usefulness and reasonability of the pseudo-common item equating process.