Pleased with your placements?

Abstract

This paper describes a technique for measuring nurse students' feelings about their placements. The method is a semantic differential scale. The scale is robust and we have researched it over a long period with various professions who include placement in their training. It has not been used in nurse education before, but will be a very useful resource indeed to nurse teachers who want to know how their students feel about their placements. The scale gives a general picture of how students feel about a placement generally; it will also show you, more specifically, how students feel about the value, relevance, breadth, liveliness and organisation of their placement. The paper describes how to administer the scale and how to score the results. It also gives some results in graphic (profiled) form, as well as in tables, in order to demonstrate the method and its possibilities in the field of nursing education.