The changing talk scale (chats): a tool to measure gains in knowledge of personcentered communication

Abstract Assessment of knowledge gain from educational interventions is common in health care research. However, validity of tools developed to measure knowledge gains is often overlooked. For our current pragmatic clinical trial, we developed two 13-item parallel forms of the Changing Talk Scale (CHATS) to measure gains in knowledge of effective and person-centered communication due to the Changing Talk Online (CHATO) communication education for nursing home staff. This has been a multi-year, multi-study process of writing and editing test items in accordance with CHATO learning objectives and results of psychometric analyses of pilot data. Items were revised based on difficulty and discrimination. The tool has improved from an initial Cronbach’s alpha of .27 (pre-education) and .14 (post-education) to .63 (pre-education) and .64 (post-education). CHATS provides an exemplar of how measuring change in knowledge is a complex process that needs to be rigorously completed to accurately capture outcomes.