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Increases in the complexity of the health care environment, coupled with increasing patient acuity, require new graduates to be more job ready than at any time in the history of health care (Tanner, 2010). However, the preparation–practice gap has been well established (Hickerson et al., 2016). Health care employers expect new graduates to possess not only psychomotor skills to deliver safe care, but also cognitive skills, such as clinical judgment, to guide the delivery of safe care. However, only 10% of nurse executives think new graduates are ready for practice (Berkow et al., 2009) and only 23% of newly graduated nurses meet skilled clinical judgment competencies (Kavanagh & Szweda, 2017). This is a decrease of 25% to 35% from the previous decade (del Bueno, 2005). Calls for nursing education reform to address patient safety concerns by strengthening educational interventions (Benner et al., 2009) require valid and reliable methods that evaluate the development of clinical judgment skills in nursing students.
Many assessment tools to measure critical thinking and decision-making skills are available. However, many are paper and pencil, designed to be completed by participants, and do not evaluate clinical judgment. The Creighton Simulation Evaluation Instrument (C-SEI™; Todd et al., 2008) evaluates clinical judgment, assessment, patient safety, and communication skills during simulation. However, the C-SEI was developed to evaluate group performance, not individual performance. Seacrist and Noell (2016) developed a clinical judgment tool for chart reviews of patient medical records to assess the nurses' role in patient care. Although this tool can assist in evaluating individual clinical judgment abilities in nursing practice, it is designed to assess nurses' charting in medical records, which may be incomplete. The Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric (LCJR; Lasater, 2007a) is emerging as an effective tool to directly measure clinical judgment based on a standardized language specific to nursing practice. Furthermore, the LCJR measures clinical judgment through observation of individual student performance during patient care. Yet, Victor-Chmil and Larew (2013) reported that at the time of their review, reliability and validity of the LCJR had been reported exclusively in research in the simulation environment and in group simulation settings. Furthermore, no review has been conducted...