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 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.