What the Students and Faculty Told Us: Using Focus Group and Survey Feedback to Rebuild the Gerontology Thread of a Practical Nursing Curriculum
[Student Name]
University of Phoenix
NSG/532: Innovative Curriculum Design
Week 3 Assignment
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The college, the program and all feedback are a composite written for a model paper.
In Week 2, I proposed a schedule of touchpoints for gathering stakeholder feedback on the revision of our practical nursing curriculum. The first phase is now complete: a graduate survey, two student focus groups and a faculty retreat. This paper reports what students, graduates and faculty said, how faculty worked together to act on it and what changed, with a focus on the gerontology thread identified as weakest in Week 1.
Graduate Survey Results
Of 139 graduates from the last three cohorts, 118 responded. Asked to rate their preparation in eight areas on a five-point scale, graduates rated medication administration highest, median 4, and three areas lowest, all median 2: caring for residents with dementia, supervising nursing assistants and managing a large group of residents on a single shift. In open comments, 41 graduates mentioned long-term care. Typical comments included "I had never cared for someone with dementia who was hitting until my first week of work" and "Nobody told me I would be in charge of five nursing assistants."
Student Focus Groups
Two focus groups of eight current students each were led by a faculty member from the college's radiography program so that students could speak freely. Notes were analyzed by me and a second faculty member separately, and we compared themes. Three themes appeared in both groups.
Theme 1: gerontology feels like an afterthought. Students described the four-week older adult unit as rushed and the long-term care clinical as a place where they "passed meds and watched."
Theme 2: tests and practice do not match. Students said most course tests asked them to remember facts, but practice questions for the licensure exam asked them to decide what to do, and they felt unprepared for the difference.
Theme 3: clinical days vary widely by instructor and site. Some students had rich experiences; others spent days with little to do.
Faculty Retreat
All nine faculty attended a one-day retreat to review the curriculum map from Week 1, the graduate survey and the focus group themes. Faculty agreed with the findings on gerontology and clinical judgment. They disagreed sharply on the remedy, which is where collaboration either happens or fails.
Three faculty who teach the acute care courses worried that moving clinical hours to long-term care would weaken students' exposure to acute illness, which still appears on the licensure exam. Two long-time faculty preferred adding a separate gerontology course. Others argued that gerontology should be threaded through every course, since older adults are the majority of patients in every setting.
Working Through Disagreement
Three strategies helped faculty reach decisions. First, we returned to the program outcomes, which none of the faculty wanted to change, and asked which option would best build each outcome. Second, we used evidence rather than preference where we could: the employment data showed where graduates work, and the licensure reports showed weak performance on judgment items across all content areas, not only acute care. Third, we agreed on a decision rule for contested changes: pilot them in one course or rotation for one term and evaluate before adopting them program-wide.
Keating and DeBoor (2018) note that faculty ownership is essential to curriculum change because faculty implement the curriculum, and a change imposed without their agreement is often undone in practice. The pilot rule gave hesitant faculty a way to agree to a test rather than to a permanent change.
Decisions
Decision 1: thread gerontology through all three terms rather than adding a separate course. Each course will include older adult content in its own area, such as heart failure in an 85-year-old in medical-surgical nursing and delirium versus dementia in mental health nursing, and the existing four-week unit will expand into a focused long-term care leadership unit in the final term.
Decision 2: rebalance clinical hours from 180 acute and 90 other hours to 120 acute and 150 in long-term care, home health and community settings, piloted with one cohort section first, as the acute care faculty requested.
Decision 3: add supervision of nursing assistants as a graded clinical expectation in the long-term care rotation, with students leading a care team for part of each shift under instructor supervision.
Decision 4: convert at least a third of test items in every course to judgment-based items, with faculty development support, to address the mismatch students described. The clinical judgment model developed for licensure testing offers a framework for writing such items (Dickison et al., 2019).
Decision 5: create clinical day guidelines for every site, listing expected activities, to reduce variation between instructors.
What Collaboration Required of the Coordinator
My role in the retreat was not to argue for a solution but to keep the discussion on evidence and outcomes, to make sure quieter faculty were heard and to write down each decision with its reasoning. Before the retreat, I met individually with the three acute care faculty, because I expected them to have the strongest concerns, and asked what evidence would reassure them. Their answer, that students must still perform well on acute care items, became part of the pilot's evaluation. Iwasiw et al. (2020) describe faculty involvement at every stage as necessary for a curriculum to be implemented as designed rather than quietly reshaped in individual classrooms.
Feedback That Was Not Acted On
Not every request was adopted, and the program will explain why. Several students asked for fewer tests; faculty kept the number but changed their content toward judgment items, which addresses the concern behind the request. Two graduates asked for a course on electronic charting; faculty decided to build documentation practice into skills lab and simulation instead of adding a course. Explaining these decisions to students and graduates is part of closing the loop proposed in Week 2.
How the Changes Will Be Checked
Each decision will be evaluated. The rebalanced clinical hours will be piloted and compared with the traditional pattern on clinical evaluations and student surveys. Test item conversion will be tracked by course. Graduates of the first revised cohort will be surveyed at six months, using the same eight preparation ratings, to see whether the three lowest-rated areas improve.
Limits of the Feedback
The feedback has limits. Graduates who responded may differ from the 21 who did not, and graduates working in hospitals were few. Focus groups reflect the views of the students who volunteered. Faculty views may be shaped by the courses they teach. Using several sources reduces but does not remove these limits, which is another reason for piloting changes and checking their effects.
Conclusion
Graduates, students and faculty confirmed the gaps found in Week 1 and added detail that only they could provide. Faculty disagreed about solutions, and collaboration succeeded because decisions were tested against outcomes and evidence and contested changes were piloted rather than imposed. Week 4 will look at the trends and issues shaping practical nursing curricula nationally.
References
Dickison, P., Haerling, K. A., & Lasater, K. (2019). Integrating the National Council of State Boards of Nursing clinical judgment model into nursing educational frameworks. Journal of Nursing Education, 58(2), 72-78. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20190122-03
Iwasiw, C. L., Andrusyszyn, M.-A., & Goldenberg, D. (2020). Curriculum development in nursing education (4th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Keating, S. B., & DeBoor, S. S. (Eds.). (2018). Curriculum development and evaluation in nursing education (5th ed.). Springer Publishing.
How this NSG 532 Week 3 example is structured
Public descriptions of NSG/532 Week 3 describe collaborating to improve curriculum development using student and faculty feedback in developing and revising curriculum. This paper reports the feedback as data, organized into themes with numbers and quotations, then shows the collaborative process that turned themes into decisions and ends with the changes and how they will be checked. Students search this week as NSG 532 Week 3, NSG532 Wk 3 or NSG/532 Wk 3; all three are the same assignment.
NSG/532 Week 3 questions, answered
What does NSG/532 Week 3 usually ask for?
Public descriptions show a focus on collaborating to improve curriculum development, using student and faculty feedback in the development and revision of curriculum.
How should focus group feedback be analyzed?
By reading transcripts or notes for recurring themes, counting how often each appears, keeping representative quotations and checking the themes with a second reader.
How do faculty resolve disagreement about curriculum changes?
By returning to the program's outcomes and evidence, discussing trade-offs openly, and agreeing on a decision rule, such as testing a change in one course before adopting it across the program.
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