NSG/532 Week 6: Course Improvement Plan, sample paper

Improving One Course, Then the Next: A Continuous Improvement Plan for the Revised Long-Term Care Leadership Course in a Practical Nursing Program

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

NSG/532: Innovative Curriculum Design

Week 6 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The college, the program and the course are a composite written for a model paper.

Over this course, I have analyzed the alignment of our practical nursing curriculum, gathered stakeholder feedback, decided on changes, examined national trends and chosen delivery modes and technology. The revision creates a new final-term course, Leadership in Long-Term Care, which replaces a four-week gerontology unit and carries the program's weakest areas: supervising nursing assistants, managing a group of residents and dementia care. This paper plans how that course will be continuously improved, using practices that will then be applied to every course.

The Course

Leadership in Long-Term Care is a five-credit final-term course with 45 theory hours, delivered in the hybrid model, and 90 clinical hours in long-term care facilities, where each student spends part of every shift directing a small team of nursing assistants while the instructor watches and coaches. Its outcomes are that students will prioritize care for a group of residents, delegate appropriately to nursing assistants within the practical nurse's scope, recognize and report changes in residents' condition using clinical judgment, respond to behavioral symptoms of dementia with person-centered approaches and communicate effectively with families and the interprofessional team.

Principles of Course Improvement

Good course improvement is continuous, based on evidence from several sources, collaborative and documented. Iwasiw et al. (2020) describe curriculum evaluation as an ongoing process built into the curriculum from the start rather than an event after problems appear. A course that is only reviewed when complaints arrive is being repaired, not improved.

Data Gathered Each Term

Student achievement: scores on each course outcome, taken from mapped test items, clinical evaluation criteria and the final leadership project.

Item analysis: difficulty and discrimination indices for every test item, with special attention to the new judgment-based items.

Clinical evaluation: the percentage of students meeting each clinical competency, and instructor comments.

Student feedback: an end-of-course survey on each outcome, the hybrid delivery and clinical sites, and a brief mid-course check so problems can be fixed during the term.

Faculty reflection: a one-page reflection from each instructor on what worked and what did not.

Site feedback: a short survey of the charge nurses and directors of nursing at clinical sites about students' performance and readiness.

The Review Cycle

Within three weeks of each term's end, the course faculty meet for a two-hour review. The course lead prepares a summary of the data, and faculty answer four questions: Did students achieve each outcome at the target level of 80% meeting the standard? Where did they fall short, and what does the evidence suggest about why? What will we change next term? What did we change last term, and did it work? Decisions and their reasons are recorded in a course improvement log that is kept with the course file.

Once a year, the curriculum committee reviews all course logs together, looking for patterns across courses, such as weak clinical judgment across several courses, which would suggest a program-level issue. Every three years, a fuller review includes the advisory board and graduates.

Decision Rules

To keep changes thoughtful, faculty agreed on rules. A change is made when an outcome falls below the target in two consecutive terms, when a problem is identified by two or more data sources or when a safety concern arises. Only one or two major changes are made per term so their effects can be seen. Each change states in advance what evidence will show whether it worked. Test items with negative discrimination are reviewed and revised or removed before the next offering.

An Example Cycle

In the first pilot term, 72% of students met the delegation competency, below the 80% target, and site surveys and instructor comments both reported that students hesitated to give direction to experienced nursing assistants. Faculty decided to add a two-hour role-play on delegation conversations before the clinical rotation, with nursing assistants from a partner facility playing themselves, and set the expectation that at least 80% would meet the competency the next term. In the second term, 86% met it, and the change was kept.

Connecting Course Improvement to Program Evaluation

The course carries three of the program's outcomes, so its data feed the program evaluation directly. Aggregated results show whether the revision has closed the gaps identified in Week 1. Over the longer term, the program will watch the first revised cohort's licensure pass rate, especially judgment-based performance, and the six-month graduate survey on the three preparation areas graduates rated lowest before the revision (Keating & DeBoor, 2018).

Aligning With National Competencies

The course outcomes will be checked each year against the national competency statements for practical nursing graduates on which the program's outcomes are based (National League for Nursing, 2010), so that local improvements do not drift away from the profession's expectations. If those statements are revised, the course and program outcomes will be reviewed in the next annual cycle.

Using Improvement Data With Students

Students will also see the cycle at work. At the start of each term, the course lead will tell the new cohort what the previous cohort's feedback changed, such as the delegation role-play. Showing students that their comments lead to changes improves the response rate and the honesty of the feedback, which in turn improves the data the cycle depends on.

Faculty Development

Continuous improvement depends on faculty skill. Faculty will receive training in writing judgment-based items, reading item analysis reports and debriefing, and the course lead will mentor new clinical instructors. Faculty time for the review cycle will be included in workload.

Documentation and Transparency

The course improvement log will be kept in a shared folder available to all program faculty and the curriculum committee. Each entry records the term, the data reviewed, the decision, the reason and the evidence that will show whether the change worked, followed in the next term by the result. The log also serves accreditation and state board reviews, which ask programs to show that they use data to improve. More importantly, it preserves the program's memory, so that when faculty change, the reasons behind the course's design do not leave with them.

Sustaining the Cycle

Improvement cycles often fade after the first year, when the energy of a revision is gone. To sustain this one, the review meeting will be scheduled for the full year in advance, the course lead role will rotate every two years so more faculty learn it and the curriculum committee will ask for every course log each year.

Conclusion

Continuous improvement of the new long-term care leadership course rests on data from six sources every term, a structured review with clear questions, decision rules that keep changes deliberate and a documented log that links course results to program outcomes. Applied course by course, the same practices will keep the revised curriculum aligned with our graduates' work, which was the problem that began this course.

References

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.

National League for Nursing. (2010). Outcomes and competencies for graduates of practical/vocational, diploma, associate degree, baccalaureate, master's, practice doctorate, and research doctorate programs in nursing.