An assessment blueprint for the Advanced Medical Life Support two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program in the United States.
OBJECTIVE
Traditional approaches to blueprint creation may focus on fine-grained detail at the expense of important foundational concepts. The purpose of this study was to develop a method for constructing an assessment blueprint to guide the creation of a new post-test for a two-day prehospital emergency medical services training program.


METHODS
In order to create the blueprint, we first determined the proportions of the total classroom and home-study minutes associated with the lower- and higher-order cognitive objectives of each chapter of the textbook and the two-day classroom activities during training courses conducted from January to April 2015. These proportions were then applied to a 50-question test structure in order to calculate the number of desired questions by chapter and content type.


RESULTS
Our blueprint called for the test to contain an almost even split of lower- and higher-order cognitive questions. One-best-answer multiple choice items and extended matching-type items were written to assess lower- and higher-order cognitive content, respectively.


CONCLUSIONS
We report the first known application of an assessment blueprint to a prehospital professional development education program. Our approach to blueprint creation is computationally straightforward and could be easily adopted by a group of instructors with a basic understanding of lower- and higher-order cognitive constructs. By blueprinting at the chapter level, as we have done, item-writers should be more inclined to construct questions that focus on important central themes or procedures.
Simulation Training & Education Laboratory (SiTEL), MedStar Health, Washington, DC, USA.
Les R
0000-0003-4149-7490
LR
Becker
Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, Tulsa, OK, USA.
Matt
0000-0003-2859-6152
M
Vassar
Choice behavior; Cognition; Emergency medical services; Test writing