Development and psychometric evaluation of the competency inventory for nursing students: a learning outcome perspective.

Deficiency in essential core competencies could jeopardize the safety of patients. Adopting the outcome-based approach, a set of minimally required core competencies for nursing students was developed to ensure the quality of nursing education. Determination of what point to measure competency is needed. Most importantly, competence indicators of nursing students can be used in curriculum development, planning, and learning outcome evaluation. The purpose of this study was to develop a competency inventory to measure learning outcomes of baccalaureate nursing students and to test its psychometric properties. Psychometric testing was conducted with a convenience sample of 599 nursing students in 2011. Principal axis factor analysis was performed on the 52-item scale to determine construct validity and Cronbach's alpha was used to measure the internal consistency. Principal axis factoring method identified six factors through the direct oblimin rotations including pattern matrix and structure matrix: ethical and responsibility, general clinical skills, lifelong learning, clinical biomedical science, caring and critical thinking reasoning. Exploratory factor analysis yielded an instrument with 43-items on six factors, accounting for 69.84% of the variance in scores. The Competency Inventory of Nursing Students (CINS) factors ranged from 0.91 to 0.98. This study shows that the Competency Inventory of Nursing Students has satisfactory psychometric properties and could be a useful instrument for measuring learning outcomes of nursing student. The competence indicators show merit for assessing learning outcomes for nursing students in nursing education. However, a cross-validation of the scale with another sample is also needed.