Abstract:

Background:
In health professional education, a key focus is the mastery of psychomotor skills, movement-based performances that require not only accurate execution but also consistent and proficient performances under varying conditions. For first-year nursing and midwifery students, who are novices without prior experiential background, acquiring these skills can be particularly challenging. Psychomotor nursing skills are essential for safe, high-quality patient care, and early inaccuracies in their performance may have immediate implications for patient safety. This highlights the need for students to develop these skills correctly from the start, with early detection of misconceptions and comprehensive, targeted feedback throughout training. Skill instruction commonly begins with knowledge acquisition and teacher-led demonstrations, followed by deliberate practice in skills labs, with formative assessment and feedback. Before these skills can be transferred to clinical practice, students are traditionally assessed summatively through direct observation, the predominant method in health professional education. However, assessing large cohorts synchronously within limited timeframes requires many expert assessors, is resource-intensive, and can be stressful for students. Asynchronous video-based assessment offers a potential alternative. It allows assessors to provide visual and concrete feedback, enriching students’ understanding of their psychomotor performance. Moreover, recorded performances can be reviewed repeatedly, at flexible times and locations, facilitating consistency across raters and enabling the detection of potential biases. The reliability of assessment is crucial because it underpins students’ learning outcomes and clinical grades. Despite these potential advantages, the reliability of video-based assessment remains underexplored in nursing and midwifery education.

Objective:
In our ongoing research project (2022–2026) we investigate whether asynchronous, video-based assessment provides a reliable, learner-centred alternative to traditional live assessment for novice psychomotor nursing skill performances.

Methods:
Consecutive cohorts of all first-year bachelor nursing and midwifery students were invited between 2022 and 2025. To ensure a baseline level of experience, only students without prior experience in performing the selected psychomotor nursing skills were included. Immediately after a standardised teacher demonstration, each student who signed informed consent, performed the nursing skill on a task trainer in the skills lab. Performances were recorded using two strategically positioned full-HD cameras capturing both front and top views. These recordings were retrospectively annotated by teachers from various health science disciplines and by student peers, using a criterion-referenced checklist, allowing to explore inter- and intra-rater reliability. The same design was applied for three nursing skills of differing complexity.

Anticipated contribution:
This study aims to determine whether asynchronous video-based assessment can serve as a reliable, learner-centred alternative to traditional live assessment. We will share our findings on inter- and intra-rater reliability, and discuss implications for teachers seeking a time-efficient approach to support the assessment of psychomotor skills in health professional education.

Keywords:

Health professional education, psychomotor skills, video-based assessment, reliability.