Development of an assessment tool to measure students’ perceptions of respiratory care education programs: Item generation, item reduction, and preliminary validation

OBJECTIVES: Students who perceived their learning environment positively are more likely to develop effective learning strategies, and adopt a deep learning approach. Currently, there is no validated instrument for measuring the educational environment of educational programs on respiratory care (RC). The aim of this study was to develop an instrument to measure students’ perception of the RC educational environment. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Based on the literature review and an assessment of content validity by multiple focus groups of RC educationalists, potential items of the instrument relevant to RC educational environment construct were generated by the research group. The initial 71 item questionnaire was then field-tested on all students from the 3 RC programs in Saudi Arabia and was subjected to multi-trait scaling analysis. Cronbach's alpha was used to assess internal consistency reliabilities. RESULTS: Two hundred and twelve students (100%) completed the survey. The initial instrument of 71 items was reduced to 65 across 5 scales. Convergent and discriminant validity assessment demonstrated that the majority of items correlated more highly with their intended scale than a competing one. Cronbach's alpha exceeded the standard criterion of >0.70 in all scales except one. There was no floor or ceiling effect for scale or overall score. CONCLUSIONS: This instrument is the first assessment tool developed to measure the RC educational environment. There was evidence of its good feasibility, validity, and reliability. This first validation of the instrument supports its use by RC students to evaluate educational environment.