Journal of International Education Research – Fourth Quarter 2012 Volume 8, Number 4 © 2012 The Clute Institute http://www.cluteinstitute.com/ 393 Developing And Validating A Tool To Assess Ethical Decision-Making Ability Of Nursing Students, Using Rubrics Apinya Indhraratana, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand Wannee Kaemkate, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to develop a reliable and valid tool to assess ethical decision-making ability of nursing students using rubrics. A proposed ethical decision making process, from reviewing related literature was used as a framework for developing the rubrics. Participants included purposive sample of 86 nursing students from the Royal Thai Army Nursing College, experts in measuring and evaluation, and experts in nursing ethics, in Thailand. The results from the study showed that the content validity of the rubrics was adequate, 47 out of 48 scoring rubrics criteria had satisfied IOC’s indexes over 0.5. Internal consistency using Cronbach’s alpha coefficients was .865. Inter-rater reliabilities were between .804 and .903, intra-rater reliability was .948. Keywords: Ethical Decision-Making Ability; Rubric Assessment; Nursing Students 1. INTRODUCTION urses regularly encounter ethical problems arise from their daily involvement in patient care. (Numminen and Leino-Kilpi , 2007; Gastmans, 2002; Goelthal, Gastmans, & Castelé, 2010). Rapid technological advances creating complex care situations in which nurses are expected to autonomously make decisions in delivering good care to patients within the confines of strictly deadlines. (Goelthal, Gastmans, & Castelé, 2010). Therefore nursing students need to be well prepared to be responsible professionals who are able to provide high quality care and capable of making autonomous ethical decision-making. (Numminen and Leino-Kilpi , 2007) There has been a clear consensus by many educators and researchers that ethical decision-making is an essential component in nursing ethics curriculum. The goal of nursing ethics education is to produce a morally accountable practitioner who is skilled in ethical decision-making ((Numminen and Leino-Kilpe, 2007; Fry, 2008) However, there is paucity of research explicitly concerned with ethical decision making in nursing education. Likewise, the appropriate instrument to measure the ethical decision making process of nursing students is scarce in nursing literature (Numminen and Leino-Kilpe, 2007), thus the development of a reliable and valid tool to assess ethical decision-making is needed. An ethical problem is difficult to deal with, solve, or overcome (Park, 2012). Many studies have revealed the complexity of ethical decision-making, which refers to the entire decision process, composed of many components and cognitive steps, starting from recognition of the ethical issues, follow by observation, analysis and reasoning, to making actual decision. (Park, 2012; Tsai et al., 2009; Numminen and Leino-Kilpe, 2007; Goelthal, Gastmans, & Castelé, 2010) In order to develop a valid and reliable tool to measure ethical decision making, all potential components and cognitive steps must be explored, ethical decision-making ability should be evaluated in terms of the decision process as the well as the quality of the conclusion. (Park, 2012; Tsai et al, 2009). However, there is no ethical decision-making assessment tool built from a comprehensive evaluation of the cognitive steps used in the process or its underlying components N