Assessment and Diagnostic Skills Essays
For this assignment, you will complete a Aquifer case study based on the course objectives and weekly content. Aquifer cases emphasize core learning objectives for an evidence-based primary care curriculum. Throughout your nurse practitioner program, you will use the Aquifer case studies to promote the development of clinical reasoning through the use of ongoing assessment and diagnostic skills and to develop patient care plans that are grounded in the latest clinical guidelines and evidence-based practice.Assessment and Diagnostic Skills Essays
After you complete the Aquifer case study for the week, please print out the summary of your case session and submit as a PDF file to the Submissions Area. Note that the summary of your case session has your name on the top right hand corner. You need to submit this document as evidence that you have completed the case.
The Aquifer assignments are highly interactive and a dynamic way to enhance your learning. Material from the Aquifer cases will be present in the weekly quizzes, midterm, and final exam. You must have all Aquifer assignments completed in order to successfully pass the course.Assessment and Diagnostic Skills Essays
Use this link for information on how to access and navigate Aquifer.
This week complete the case entitled “Case #22: 70-year-old male with new-onset unilateral weakness – Mr. Wright.”
Submission Details:
Name your document SU_NSG6440_W3_Mid Week Project_Last Name_First Initial.pdf.
Submit your document to the Submissions Area by the due date assigned.
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.Assessment and Diagnostic Skills Essays
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.Assessment and Diagnostic Skills Essays
What Is Diagnostic Assessment?
Imagine being a teacher in a new classroom. You begin teaching a lesson only to be met with stares of confusion from your students. When you ask the students if they understand what you are teaching, they reply that they have no idea what you’re talking about. Now imagine teaching that same class after conducting a pretest to determine what the students already know about the topic. Which scenario sounds preferable? Which would result in a better experience for both the teacher and the students?
Diagnostic assessment is a form of per-assessment that allows a teacher to determine students’ individual strengths, weaknesses, knowledge, and skills prior to instruction. It is primarily used to diagnose student difficulties and to guide lesson and curriculum planning. Assessment and Diagnostic Skills Essays
Benefits of Diagnostic Assessment
As you may have surmised, diagnostic assessment benefits both the instructor and the students. First, it allows teachers to plan meaningful and efficient instruction. When a teacher knows exactly what students know or don’t know about a topic, she can focus lessons on the topics students still need to learn about rather than what they already know. This cuts down on student frustration and boredom.
Second, it provides information to individualize instruction. It may show a teacher that a small group of students needs additional instruction on a particular portion of a unit or course of study. He can then provide remediation for those students so that they can fully engage with new content. Similarly, if a teacher discovers that a group of students has already mastered a large portion of a unit of study, he can design activities that allow that group to go beyond the standard curriculum for that topic through independent or small group study. Assessment and Diagnostic Skills Essays
Finally, it creates a baseline for assessing future learning. It shows both the teacher and the students what is known before instruction has occurred. Thus, it sets a baseline on a topic. As the students move through instruction, they can see what they are or aren’t learning, and the teacher can provide remediation or enrichment as needed.
Examples of Diagnostic Assessments
Diagnostic assessments can come in many different forms. A couple of common uses of this tool include unit pretests and diagnostic assessments prior to individual instruction.
One of the simplest and most powerful classroom-level uses of diagnostic assessment is the unit pretest, which occurs prior to instruction on a particular unit of study to gather information about what students know about the topic. When giving a unit pretest, be sure to focus on the core concepts and skills that you expect students to know and be able to demonstrate at the end of the unit. Many textbooks and curriculum sets have pretests you can use or adapt.Assessment and Diagnostic Skills Essays