Clinical Nurse Faculty and the Lived Experience of Clinical Grading

Clinical grading is one approach to assure that future nurses have the knowledge and skills to provide safe patient care. The phenomenon being explored for this study was the experience of clinical grading for clinical nurse faculty. Through the use of a qualitative phenomenological method, the lived experience of grading nursing student clinical performance for experienced clinical nurse faculty in pre-licensure programs is described. Eleven full-time nursing faculty were recruited using a purposive technique to obtain a convenience sample. Each participant first underwent an initial in-depth personal interview followed by a brief follow-up interview a few weeks later. The van Manen method of hermeneutic phenomenology was applied to describe and interpret the data while developing an understanding of the experience for the participants. Findings from this study revealed five essential themes. These essential themes were collated to form a textual interpretive statement which illuminated the meaning of the experience of clinical grading for the participants. B