An assessment blueprint for the Advanced Medical Life Support two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program in the United States

Purpose: Traditional approaches to blueprint creation may focus on fine-grained detail at the expense of important foundational concepts. The purpose of this study was to develop a method for constructing an assessment blueprint to guide the creation of a new post-test for a two-day prehospital emer...

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Main Authors: Les R. Becker, Matt Vassar
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Korea Health Insurance Licensing Examination Institute 2015-08-01
Series:Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.jeehp.org/upload/jeehp-12-43.pdf
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spelling doaj-eaa0334f2e284b3abe65cf48b00d65292020-11-24T22:39:59ZengKorea Health Insurance Licensing Examination InstituteJournal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions1975-59372015-08-011210.3352/jeehp.2015.12.43170An assessment blueprint for the Advanced Medical Life Support two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program in the United StatesLes R. Becker0Matt Vassar1 Simulation Training & Education Laboratory (SiTEL), MedStar Health, Washington, DC, USA Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, Tulsa, OK, USAPurpose: Traditional approaches to blueprint creation may focus on fine-grained detail at the expense of important foundational concepts. The purpose of this study was to develop a method for constructing an assessment blueprint to guide the creation of a new post-test for a two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program. Methods: In order to create the blueprint, we first determined the proportions of the total classroom and home-study minutes associated with the lower- and higher-order cognitive objectives of each chapter of the textbook and the two-day classroom activities during training courses conducted from January to April 2015. These proportions were then applied to a 50-question test structure in order to calculate the number of desired questions by chapter and content type. Results: Our blueprint called for the test to contain an almost even split of lower- and higher-order cognitive questions. One-best-answer multiple choice items and extended matching-type items were written to assess lower- and higher-order cognitive content, respectively. Conclusion: We report the first known application of an assessment blueprint to a prehospital professional development education program. Our approach to blueprint creation is computationally straightforward and could be easily adopted by a group of instructors with a basic understanding of lower- and higher-order cognitive constructs. By blueprinting at the chapter level, as we have done, item-writers should be more inclined to construct questions that focus on important central themes or procedures.http://www.jeehp.org/upload/jeehp-12-43.pdfChoice behaviorCognitionEmergency medical servicesTest writing
collection DOAJ
language English
format Article
sources DOAJ
author Les R. Becker
Matt Vassar
spellingShingle Les R. Becker
Matt Vassar
An assessment blueprint for the Advanced Medical Life Support two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program in the United States
Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions
Choice behavior
Cognition
Emergency medical services
Test writing
author_facet Les R. Becker
Matt Vassar
author_sort Les R. Becker
title An assessment blueprint for the Advanced Medical Life Support two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program in the United States
title_short An assessment blueprint for the Advanced Medical Life Support two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program in the United States
title_full An assessment blueprint for the Advanced Medical Life Support two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program in the United States
title_fullStr An assessment blueprint for the Advanced Medical Life Support two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program in the United States
title_full_unstemmed An assessment blueprint for the Advanced Medical Life Support two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program in the United States
title_sort assessment blueprint for the advanced medical life support two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program in the united states
publisher Korea Health Insurance Licensing Examination Institute
series Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions
issn 1975-5937
publishDate 2015-08-01
description Purpose: Traditional approaches to blueprint creation may focus on fine-grained detail at the expense of important foundational concepts. The purpose of this study was to develop a method for constructing an assessment blueprint to guide the creation of a new post-test for a two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program. Methods: In order to create the blueprint, we first determined the proportions of the total classroom and home-study minutes associated with the lower- and higher-order cognitive objectives of each chapter of the textbook and the two-day classroom activities during training courses conducted from January to April 2015. These proportions were then applied to a 50-question test structure in order to calculate the number of desired questions by chapter and content type. Results: Our blueprint called for the test to contain an almost even split of lower- and higher-order cognitive questions. One-best-answer multiple choice items and extended matching-type items were written to assess lower- and higher-order cognitive content, respectively. Conclusion: We report the first known application of an assessment blueprint to a prehospital professional development education program. Our approach to blueprint creation is computationally straightforward and could be easily adopted by a group of instructors with a basic understanding of lower- and higher-order cognitive constructs. By blueprinting at the chapter level, as we have done, item-writers should be more inclined to construct questions that focus on important central themes or procedures.
topic Choice behavior
Cognition
Emergency medical services
Test writing
url http://www.jeehp.org/upload/jeehp-12-43.pdf
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