Abstract
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.
Highlights
The National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians launched its Advanced Medical Life Support (AMLS) education program in 1999
In order to expand the scope of the written examination to more fully focus upon the application of knowledge, we developed an assessment blueprint for the AMLS 16-hour two-day program
Development of an assessment blueprint Based upon a review of the literature, we developed an assessment blueprint derived from previous research [3]
Summary
The National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians launched its Advanced Medical Life Support (AMLS) education program in 1999. The course emphasizes the use of scene size-up, history taking, interactive group discussion about potential treatment strategies, and physical examinations to systematically rule out and consider possibilities and probabilities in treating medical crises. This program employs an initial assessment-based approach that progresses to a diagnostic-based approach in order to quickly develop the best treatment plan for a given scenario. In order to expand the scope of the written examination to more fully focus upon the application of knowledge, we developed an assessment blueprint for the AMLS 16-hour two-day program
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