Development and validation of an instrument to assess the self- confidence of students enrolled in the advanced pharmacy practice experience

American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, Spring 2002 by Wongwiwatthananukit, Supakit, Newton, Gail D, Popovich, Nicholas G

National Expert Panel. A national expert panel was recruited through the guidance from deans of several schools/colleges of pharmacy. Fourteen deans (i.e., seven public and seven private schools/colleges) were randomly selected from the 81 nationwide pharmacy colleges/schools (i.e., 57 public and 24 private colleges/schools) based on US geographic areas (i.e., pacific, mountain, central, eastern). They were contacted via email and asked to identify within their respective college/school an educator and/or practitioner to serve on a national content review panel. Six public and six private colleges/schools of pharmacy deans responded and recommended 14 experts from their colleges/schools to participate in the content review of the developed instrument. These fourteen experts, representing 12 colleges/schools of pharmacy nationwide, were then contacted and asked to participate in the content review process. Thirteen out of the 14 contacted agreed to review the content of the developed instrument. The majority of experts were male (eight out of 13) and had earned the PharmD degree (nine PharmD, two MS, two PhD). Eleven out of 13 expert panelists were currently precepting students.

A set of forms including the 73 items was forwarded to the 13 national content review panel members. The panel was asked to rate each proposed item's relevance in measuring a student's self-confidence in general competencies when performing tasks during clerkships using a content validity index (CVI)(17). The CVI was a four-point ordinal scale: 1 = not relevant, 2 = unable to assess relevance without item revision or item is in need of such revision that it would no longer be relevant, 3 = relevant, but needing minor alteration, and 4 = very relevant. A CVI was then calculated for each item. The CVI for each item is the proportion of experts who rated the item as content valid, i.e., a rating of three or four. For the thirteen experts used in this study, the proportion whose endorsement was required to establish content validity beyond the 0.05 level of significance was 0.77(17). In other words, ten experts out of thirteen had to rate the item either a three or a four before it would be judged to have content validity.

The expert panelists were asked to suggest any additional components or tasks related to pharmacy students' general competencies in performing clerkship tasks that should be included in the instrument, but were unintentionally omitted. They were also asked to suggest modifications for the individual items (e.g., reword, revise, grammatical corrections). Based on the national expert review panel, four items were deleted from the 73-item instrument because these neither met the CVI nor related/represented the four subscale domains of the instrument. This then left 69 items. There were some minor suggestions made by the reviewers to improve the clarity of the remaining 69 items (ie., wording changes, grammatical corrections). Sixty-nine items were accordingly revised and five new items were included in the instrument. This resulted in a 74-item instrument. The 74 items were then formatted (ie., Clerkship Student Self-Confidence Assessment Instrument) and used in the pilot test step of the study. Each item was randomly placed in the instrument so that there would be no effect of item order on the self-confidence ratings.