Eight Ways to Measure: Ideas that COUNT

Miriam Bowers-Abbott

Writer’s Camp Counselor

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What can be measured in nursing education?

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In publishing efforts, quantitative data points are king. While qualitative observations might also be interesting on many fronts, they’re not typically measurable in any objective way like heart rate or blood glucose levels. And like quantity, objectivity is highly valued.

So, for any writing project in nursing education with publishing aspirations, a fundamental question to ask is: What can we objectively measure?

The happy answer is this: We can measure a lot of things. In fact, sometimes we can even quantify qualitative feels. That is, we can pull quantitative data points from qualitative observations. Let’s look at the empires of data you already have access to in an educational environment, with one proviso: Any time data are pulled from any sort of institution (like a college or hospital), it’s a good idea to have a conversation with your Institutional Review Board beforehand, just to make sure you comply with its constraints on use of data.

With that in mind, here we go . . .

ONE: Results From Student Performance on Examinations

Let’s begin with some low-hanging fruit: student performance on exams, especially standardized ones such as ATI or NCLEX, can be an excellent measuring stick. Standardized exams are particularly good for measuring in this respect because they’re highly vetted and widely recognized as exams that ask valid questions. And they do more than measure the performance of students–aggregate exam scores can also tell us how well a particular education approach is working.

That is, the efficacy of a new teaching innovation may be measured in terms of student performance in the presence of, and also in the absence of, the innovation. Comparison is key, and it can be based on differences in course section performance or in historical performance from before and after the innovation.

TWO: Results from Likert Scale Questions on Student Course Evaluations

Similarly, numerical averages on Likert scale questions in end-of-term evaluations are another example of quantitative evidence. Such evaluations are typically anonymous, so the data points are likely compatible with institutional constraints. Each individual question will have its own Likert score, and changes in individual question scores provide a measurable way to assess the success of a new teaching approach.

One again, comparison is key. To measure meaningfully, you’ll want to contrast the averages with and without the innovation.

THREE: Results From Comments in Student Evaluations

Compared to leveraging Likert scored items, comments in student evaluations present more challenges when looking for quantitative evidence. That said, there are features within comments that are objective. How many times is the word “dislike” (or a synonym used)? How many times is the term “difficult” used? Has the number of grammatical errors changed over the years? Do the comments tell us about nursing professionalism? What other terms or sentiments can you count?

FOUR: Learning Management System Analytics

Many learning management systems (LMS), such as Canvas, provide instructors with access to information regarding time students spend on a page, time spent on exam questions, and submission time. Such data allows for interesting questions such as how does submission time relate to final grade? How many students decline to visit introductory materials and visit the assignment section first? How many students visit the syllabus page for longer than 10 seconds?

FIVE: Student Discussion Posts or Written Assignments

Much like student evaluation comments, discussion posts or written assignments are usually viewed only as rich sources of qualitative data. They are also rich sources of quantitative data points. For institutions with memberships to applications such as Grammarly, aggregate writing competence can be assessed. The frequency of particular word types or agreement in student replies may be checked.  Are word counts growing in submissions? (In an age of common AI use and its verbosity, it seems like they are.)

SIX: Emails

The language of email correspondence can be assessed in much the same way as student discussion posts and written assignments. Depending on the depth of archives, other questions about frequency and timing of emails also provide promising quantitative information.

SEVEN: Data From Surveys That You Conduct

Of course, surveys can always be conducted, within a course or on a bigger scale within an institution. If a survey is in the works, it’s good to keep the concept of “validation” in mind. When it comes to surveys, it’s important to be able to establish that the questions asked are valid ways to collect measurements. While it’s possible to provide evidence of validity in a self-designed survey, sometimes the path of least resistance is to consult the literature and leverage a survey that has already been identified as valid. The field of psychology has many such published surveys on topics that include confidence, conflict, and professionalism. They are equipped to provide quantitative data.

EIGHT: Combine for Comparisons or Disconnects

Can combining measurements count as an eighth option? Sure it can. What if a student course evaluation reports that students hate an intervention and find it useless . . . but their exam performance says otherwise? That’s exciting! That means there’s a disconnect and a new mystery to solve in investigating educational approaches.

Further, sometimes the top result isn’t the most interesting result in data collection. In a recent personal project to count student email queries, it seems like Thursday was the biggest day for sending and receiving emails. That was not surprising, given Thursday was also deadline day. Nothing much ever happened on Wednesdays, though. It was the emptiest day by far. Why? Well, we haven’t figured that out yet. Look at the high numbers, low at the the low numbers, and look at everything in between. You never know where the treasure might lie.

Conclusion

Of course, there are more ways to measure and quantify than the eight ways we’ve mentioned here. Thanks to the rapid emergence of new technologies, new measurement paths present themselves all the time. All it takes to find the right match is a little brainstorming. Then, once you’ve measured and collected your data, you’ll be able to put a bow on it by creating a gorgeous table of the information that you collected for the reader. A table of the collected data points is truly the finishing touch, and it often serves as a form of “proof” that a project really did collect measurable evidence for its conclusions.

Happy counting!

Author: Miriam Bowers-Abbott

Reviewed and edited by: Leslie H. Nicoll

Copyright © 2025 Writer’s Camp and Miriam Bowers-Abbott CC-BY-ND 4.0

Citation: Bowers-Abbott M. Eight ways to measure ideas that count. Writer’s Camp Journal, 2025; 1(2):5. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.15871095