Twenty Hours a Week and First in the Family: Who a Rural BSN Program's Students Actually Are, Read Through Jeffreys's Retention Model, and Four Design Decisions That Follow
Student Name
American College of Education
NUR6003: Influencing Forces in Nursing Education
Module 5 Assignment
Instructor Name
February 11, 2030
Who the Students Are
Program design usually begins with content and outcomes and assumes a student who can attend when and where the program chooses. This paper begins with the students. Our program surveyed the 96 students admitted in fall 2029 at orientation and linked the results, with consent, to their records. Just over half, 52%, were the first in their families to attend college. Sixty-eight percent planned to work for pay during the semester, with a median of 20 hours a week, and nearly half of those worked as nursing assistants or patient care technicians. Nineteen percent were licensed practical nurses entering with advanced standing. The median age was 24, but a quarter were over 30, and 22% had children at home. The median one-way commute to campus was 41 miles, and a third lived where home internet was unreliable. These are not unusual figures for a rural public university, but they are very different from the student our schedule assumes: one who lives near campus, can attend class and clinical on any weekday and has time to study in between.
A Model for Reading the Data
Jeffreys's Nursing Universal Retention and Success model offers a framework for examining the many factors that affect whether nursing students persist and succeed. It proposes that retention and success depend on the interaction of student profile characteristics, affective factors such as self-efficacy and motivation, academic factors, environmental factors, academic and psychological outcomes, outside surrounding factors and professional integration (Jeffreys, 2015). The model is useful here for two reasons. It separates characteristics a program cannot change, such as age or family history, from the factors it can influence, such as how academic support is offered. And it gives weight to environmental factors, including finances, employment, family responsibilities and transportation, which are exactly where our students differ most from the student our schedule assumes.
Read through the model, our survey data fall mainly into two groups. Profile characteristics include first-generation status, age and prior licensure. Environmental factors include work hours, children, commute and internet access. Our current support services address academic factors, through tutoring and a success coach, but offer almost nothing for environmental ones. The program has been treating as an academic problem what its students experience as a problem of time, distance and money.
What the Evidence Says About Work and First-Generation Status
Two characteristics deserve closer attention because they are common and because evidence links them to academic results. In an inception cohort of 1,314 first-year nursing students at four institutions in Australia and New Zealand, more hours of weekly paid work were associated with lower grade point averages at the end of the first semester; students whose work was not related to nursing, and those who were not the first in their family to attend university, had higher odds of a high grade point average (Salamonson et al., 2020). Those findings come from another country and from the first semester only, and they describe associations, not causes. But they suggest two things that matter for our program. The number of hours students work is a risk factor the program should plan around rather than ignore. And the widespread assumption that working as a nursing assistant helps students academically should not be taken for granted; in that cohort, nursing-related work was not associated with better grades.
First-generation status matters for a different reason. Students whose parents did not attend college often lack the unwritten knowledge that makes college easier, such as how to approach a professor, when to drop a course or how to use office hours, and may be reluctant to ask. Our success coach reports that first-generation students are less likely to seek help until after they have failed an examination.
The Licensed Practical Nurses in the Cohort
The eighteen licensed practical nurses in the cohort are a distinct group whose needs the current design largely ignores. Most work full time as practical nurses in long-term care or clinics, many are over 30 and several are the main earners in their households. They bring years of clinical experience, but our program gives them credit for only one first-year course and then places them in the same clinical rotations as students who have never taken a blood pressure. Several have told advisers that repeating skills they perform every day at work feels like a signal that their experience does not count. Describing an LPN-to-BSN pathway designed around Knowles's model of adult learning, Huun et al. (2021) argue that these students' advancement can help diversify the registered nurse workforce, and they organize supports around what they call the student burdens of time, travel, tuition, transition, technology and touchstones. Those burdens match what our survey shows for this group almost exactly. Adult learning principles also suggest that these students learn best when new content builds on what they already know and applies directly to their work. For our program, that points to validating prior competence rather than repeating it, and to assignments that draw on students' own practice settings, such as an improvement project on the student's own long-term care unit.
Four Design Decisions
The analysis supports four decisions. First, predictable scheduling. Clinical days will be fixed for each semester and published before registration, so that students can arrange work and child care around them, and theory courses will be scheduled on two days rather than spread over five, reducing the number of 82-mile round trips. Second, a blended format for part of each theory course. One of three weekly class hours in each course will move to a structured online activity that students can complete when they choose, with the materials downloadable so that unreliable internet does not block access. Third, an early outreach system for first-generation students. The success coach will meet every first-generation student in the first three weeks, rather than waiting for a referral after a failed examination, and the first-semester seminar will include a session on how the program works, from office hours to appeals. Fourth, advanced placement for licensed practical nurses will be reviewed, so that LPN students can demonstrate prior competence through a skills validation rather than repeating the first clinical course.
The evidence also argues against one change that faculty had proposed: requiring students to work as nursing assistants during the program to build clinical experience. The cohort study suggests this would not help grades, and it would add to the hours our students already work. The program will instead offer a paid, limited-hours patient care technician role with our partner hospital during the summer, when there are no classes to compete with it.
How the Program Will Know
Because the decisions rest on associations rather than trial evidence, the program will evaluate them against its own data. The admission survey will be repeated for each cohort so that changes in the population are visible. First-semester course grades and progression rates will be reported by work hours and first-generation status, to see whether the gaps between groups narrow after the changes. The success coach will record the number of first-generation students seen before and after the first examination. And students will be asked at the end of each semester whether the schedule allowed them to keep their jobs and family commitments. If the gaps between groups do not narrow within two cohorts, the program will revisit the decisions rather than assume that the students were the problem.
References
Huun, K. M., Kummerow, A., & Jenkins, J. T. (2021). Educating and transitioning a diverse nursing workforce: LPN to BSN. Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 52(12), 558-564. https://doi.org/10.3928/00220124-20211108-07
Jeffreys, M. R. (2015). Jeffreys's Nursing Universal Retention and Success model: Overview and action ideas for optimizing outcomes A-Z. Nurse Education Today, 35(3), 425-431. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2014.11.004
Salamonson, Y., Roach, D., Crawford, R., McGrath, B., Christiansen, A., Wall, P., Kelly, M., & Ramjan, L. M. (2020). The type and amount of paid work while studying influence academic performance of first year nursing students: An inception cohort study. Nurse Education Today, 84, Article 104213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2019.104213
How this NUR 6003 Module 5 example is structured
NUR 6003 Module 5 commonly examines learner characteristics and their implications for program design; your classroom's instructions decide the population and the framework. This example presents data on real learners, organizes it with a named retention framework, uses evidence to interpret the characteristics that matter most, and turns the analysis into specific design decisions with ways to judge them.
NUR6003 Module 5 questions, answered
What does NUR6003 Module 5 usually ask for?
NUR6003 Module 5 commonly asks you to examine the characteristics of the learners in a program and explain their implications for program design. Your classroom's instructions decide the population and the framework.
Which framework should I use for learner characteristics?
A retention or adult learning framework your course names. Jeffreys's Nursing Universal Retention and Success model works well because it separates characteristics a program cannot change from factors it can influence.
Where do I get data on learners?
Program admission surveys, institutional research reports and advising records, used with appropriate permissions. Report the figures you use and explain how they shape each design decision.
Write yours, or have the desk draft it
This paper is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official American College of Education document. Read it for the moves, then write your own to the instructions in your classroom. If you want one built to your exact prompt and rubric, the first custom sample is free and arrives in 24 to 48 hours.