title: Barriers to creating a more culturally diverse nursing profession. Linguistic bias in multiple-choice nursing exams.
abstract: As part of a grant to recruit and retain multicultural and economically disadvantaged nursing students, funding was approved for a study analyzing multiple-choice nursing course exams for linguistic and cultural bias. Nineteen exams, for a total of 673 multiple-choice test items, were analyzed for this study. The categories of analysis used to identify flaws in the test items were: testwise flaws, irrelevant difficulty in stem, irrelevant difficulty in option, linguistic/structural bias, and cultural bias. Twenty-eight types of flaws occurred at least 10 times in the reviewed exams. Flaws from each of the categories are presented and discussed; specific examples are analyzed and revised.
authors.affiliation: College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bosher
mesh_terms: D018864:Cultural Diversity; D004506:Education, Nursing / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D004521:Educational Measurement / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D009729:Nursing; D014481:United States; D000078329:Workforce