COMPARATIVE STUDY TO ASSESS THE EFFECTIVENESS OF OBJECTIVE STRUCTURED CLINICAL EXAMINATION (OSCE) VERSES TRADITIONAL METHOD IN TERMS OF KNOWLEDGE REGARDING ANTENATAL EXAMINATION AMONG B.SC. NURSING 3RD YEAR STUDENTS.

Background: Most of Nursing Colleges in India follow Traditional Practical Examination for evaluation of practical or clinical skills wherein students are assessed only for knowledge and not for attitude and skill. Traditional methods have several flaws like inter-examiner marks variation, examiners subjectivity, varying difficulty level of different experiments, etc. which prevents uniform marking. These flaws could be minimized by newer methods like OSCE. Objective of the study was to know the effectiveness of objective structured Clinical examination (O.S.C.E) as a formative assessment tool as compared to traditional methods in terms of level of knowledge regarding Antenatal Examination among B.sc nursing students. Methods: A Non-Experimental research approach with descriptive comparative research design was carried out on 50 Nursing students. Students were subjected to Traditional Practical Examination followed by OSCE. Mean marks for all students were calculated by both the methods. The knowledge questionnaire for Traditional method and different stations for OSCE was used to collect data and rating scale was used for checking the level of satisfaction. Results: Average marks scored by the students in OSCE (18.74?4.395) were higher as compared to Traditional Practical Examination (13.81?3.814) which was statistically significant. 74.4% of the students strongly agreed that OSCE is fairer in comparison to Traditional Practical Examination. 90.5% students strongly agreed that variability of examiner & patient can be removed to a large extent by OSCE. Conclusion: OSCE was found to be a more effective assessment tool than traditional method. As regards perception, students strongly agreed that OSCE is fairer assessment tool compared to traditional practical examination.