Implications of multiple-choice testing in nursing education.

The evaluation of knowledge/competence is understood as an essential component of nursing education and practice. As such, nurse educators have a plethora of existing evaluation strategies from which to choose. A common written evaluative format used across all higher education settings is multiple-choice testing. This evaluation approach is accepted as a 'user-friendly' strategy to assess knowledge. Researchers from the disciplines of psychology and education have long been concerned with the consequences of multiple-choice testing on learning outcomes, a discussion that is essentially absent from the nursing literature. The purpose of this paper is to address the professional implications of multiple-choice testing in nursing. The potential knowledge consequences for nurse-learners, and by extension the provision of care to healthcare recipients, resultant from use of this testing modality are addressed within the context of the implementation of best practice guidelines in a long-term care home in a mid-sized rural and northern Canadian community with both regulated and non-regulated care providers.

A description of a process to calibrate the Morse fall scale in a long-term care home.

The purpose of this article is to describe the process of calibrating the Morse Fall Scale in a Canadian long-term care home as one aspect of a complex fall prevention program. The authors propose that the implementation of a calibration process of a fall risk assessment tool enables care providers to identify residents at greatest risk for falling. The authors further suggest that the ability to identify those residents most likely to experience a fall facilitates tailoring of fall prevention strategies for these individuals at greatest risk.