NUR5233 Module 2 program outcomes and curriculum map example

Eight Outcomes, Five Semesters, No Orphans: Writing Program and Course Outcomes for an Accelerated BSN and Mapping Where Each Is Introduced, Reinforced and Assessed

Student Name

American College of Education

NUR5233: Curriculum Development, Assessment, and Evaluation in Nursing

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

July 18, 2028

Principles for Writing Outcomes

The Module 1 analysis set four priorities for the accelerated BSN revision: organize around demonstrated competence aligned with the Essentials, teach and assess clinical judgment throughout, use clinical time strategically and fit accelerated learners. The program outcomes are the first expression of those priorities, and the task force wrote them to four rules. Each outcome describes what a graduate will be able to do, not what the program will cover. Each uses a verb that names observable performance, taken from the higher levels of the revised version of Bloom's taxonomy, such as apply, analyze, evaluate and create, since end-of-program outcomes describe complex performance (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Each maps to one or more domains of the Essentials (American Association of Colleges of Nursing [AACN], 2021). And there are few enough outcomes, eight, that every course can be traced to them and every faculty member can remember them.

The Eight Program Outcomes

By the end of the program, the graduate will be able to: first, integrate knowledge from nursing science and the graduate's prior degree to plan and deliver care for individuals across the lifespan; second, provide person-centered care that respects each person's values, culture and preferences, in partnership with patients and families; third, use clinical judgment to recognize, prioritize and respond to changes in the condition of several patients at once; fourth, apply population health principles to promote health and reduce disparities in the region's rural and urban communities; fifth, evaluate evidence and apply it to practice decisions; sixth, use quality improvement and safety science to reduce risk of harm at the individual and system levels; seventh, collaborate with interprofessional teams and use information technology to coordinate care across settings; and eighth, demonstrate professional accountability, ethical practice and a plan for ongoing personal and professional development.

Several choices in these outcomes reflect the forces analyzed earlier. The first outcome acknowledges the accelerated learners' prior degrees. The third makes clinical judgment for multiple patients an explicit end-of-program expectation, responding to the practice partners' concern about readiness. The fourth names the region's rural communities, reflecting the university's mission. Each outcome aligns with one or more of the ten Essentials domains; for example, the third aligns with the domains of person-centered care, and quality and safety, and the seventh with interprofessional partnerships, systems-based practice and informatics.

Leveling Course Outcomes

Each program outcome is expressed at a different level in each semester, so that students progress from simpler to more complex performance. Leveling uses three dimensions: the complexity of the patient situation, the number of patients and the degree of independence. For the clinical judgment outcome, the first-semester course outcome reads: recognize relevant cues and analyze their meaning for one adult patient with a stable chronic condition, with faculty guidance. The third-semester outcome reads: prioritize hypotheses and generate responses for two to three patients with acute conditions, with minimal guidance. The fifth-semester outcome reads: manage care and respond to changes in condition for a full assignment of four to five patients, independently, with the preceptor available for consultation. The verb changes, but so do the patient, the number of patients and the distance between the student and the teacher, and all three have to move together.

The task force wrote leveled outcomes for all eight program outcomes across five semesters before assigning them to courses, so that the progression was designed first and the courses were fitted to it, rather than the reverse.

From Seventeen Courses to Fourteen

Writing the leveled outcomes first made the course structure easier to see. The current curriculum teaches pathophysiology, pharmacology and health assessment as three separate first-year courses, followed by a fundamentals course, so that students learn about heart failure in pathophysiology in January, its drugs in pharmacology in February and how to assess a patient with it in March, without ever putting the three together until the medical-surgical course in the second semester. The leveled outcomes for the first semester call for students to recognize and analyze cues in one patient, which requires all three kinds of knowledge at once. The task force therefore replaced the four courses with two integrated courses, Foundations of Clinical Judgment I and II, in which each week follows one condition from mechanism to drugs to assessment to nursing care, and in which accelerated students complete the foundational reading independently before class. The two specialty courses in mental health and maternal-newborn nursing remain separate because their clinical placements are distinct, and the leadership content is folded into the capstone, where students manage a full assignment and can practice delegation and prioritization in context. The result is 14 courses instead of 17, with the same total credits, fewer handoffs of content between courses and more room in each course for application.

The Curriculum Map

Harden (2001) describes curriculum mapping as a way of making the curriculum transparent by displaying the relationships among outcomes, content, learning opportunities and assessment, so that staff and students can see where and how each outcome is learned. The task force's map is a table with the eight program outcomes as rows and the redesigned program's 14 courses as columns. Each cell records whether the course introduces the outcome, reinforces it or assesses it for mastery, and names the specific assessment that provides evidence.

Reading the map revealed three problems that would otherwise have been invisible. First, the population health outcome was introduced in the first semester and then not addressed again until the community health course in the fourth, a gap of two semesters in which students had no opportunity to build on it. The task force added a population health component to the second and third medical-surgical courses, using the patients' home communities as the population. Second, the evidence-based practice outcome was assessed for mastery only by a research paper in the second semester, long before students had enough clinical experience to apply evidence meaningfully. The mastery assessment moved to an evidence-based practice project in the capstone. Third, the professional development outcome had no assessment at all in the first draft, an orphan outcome. A portfolio, begun in the first semester and assessed at the end of the program, now provides the evidence.

Keeping the Map Honest

A curriculum map becomes inaccurate as soon as courses change, so the task force adopted three rules. Any change to a course's outcomes or major assessments must be accompanied by an updated map entry before the curriculum committee will approve it. Each course's syllabus will list the program outcomes it addresses and at which level, drawn directly from the map, so that students see the same connections faculty do. And each spring, the curriculum committee will review the map against the assessment data from the previous year, checking whether outcomes marked as assessed for mastery actually produced evidence of student achievement. That review is the bridge to the program evaluation plan in Module 5.

References

American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2021). The essentials: Core competencies for professional nursing education.

Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. Longman.

Harden, R. M. (2001). AMEE Guide No. 21: Curriculum mapping: A tool for transparent and authentic teaching and learning. Medical Teacher, 23(2), 123-137. https://doi.org/10.1080/01421590120036547