A humanistic-educative approach to evaluation in nursing education

A continuing challenge for nurse educators is to create a learning environment in which students receive fair and timely evaluations. Traditional or behavioural evaluation methods have been criticized as being too limited. A humanistic-educative evaluation method is offered with its emancipation of faculty and students and emphasis on collaboration, caring, creativity, critical thinking and self-assessment. A teacher–student shared home visit for a Family Nursing clinical assignment is provided to illustrate this approach. The potential benefit of the method for developing self-directed and competent professional nurses is proposed.