NURS FPX 6108 Assessment 3 Curriculum Theory, Frameworks, and Models

• NURS FPX6108 Assessment 3

Curriculum Theory, Frameworks, and Models

Student name

Capella University

NURS FPX6108

Professor Name

Submission Date

Designing effective nursing curricula involves theory and intentional design. When developing nursing curricula, theory informs the order of knowledge, the techniques of teaching, and the modalities of testing. The University of Pittsburgh, Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program’s competency-based curriculum is developed per the AACN (2021) Essentials. Kumar and Rewari (2022) posit that curriculum design is the synergy of the institution and the learner. The organizing theory and conceptual design of Pitt’s BSN curriculum are the primary aim of this article.

Description of the Selected Health Care Curriculum

There is a consideration of the community served and the contextual elements of the institution when describing a nursing curriculum. As an illustration, the University Of Pittsburgh School Of Nursing, established in 1939, is among the earliest institutions for nursing education in the United States (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). The School of Nursing is in Pittsburgh, PA, and is in the Victoria Building, partnered with the UPMC health system. While the School of Nursing is at the UPMC, they provide a number of clinical education experiences to students. The School of Nursing is sufficiently resourced and has adequate opportunities to help students prepare for nursing.

The Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program is an inclusive pre-licensure nursing program designed with all healthcare sector nursing students in mind. The primary participants of this program are probably nursing students transferring from other universities (University of Pittsburgh, 2024) and newly graduated students from high school. Nursing students, as a program requirement, are required to carry out a minimum of 1,200 hours of clinical practice in various locations, including hospitals, clinics, and other locations within the community (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). Quality clinical practice has positively and effectively contributed to the development of confidence and competence in students (Beiranvand et al. 2022).

Fundamental Organizing Design and Theoretical Framework

Designing a curriculum is important for structuring learning instances to facilitate the preparation of the practitioner role. To cite another example, the Pitt BSN program follows the Professional Nursing Competency Model of Design of the AACN (2021), The Essentials: Core Competencies for Professional Nursing. In this case, all courses, assessments, and clinical experiences are meaningfully and directly connected to professional competencies (AACN, 2021). Competency-Based Education (CBE) is the design that is most appropriate for the health professions programs in which students are expected to bring forth demonstrable capabilities.

Pitt’s BSN program should include a competency-based framework because the final product must have specific skills and knowledge pertaining to nursing. Research shows that many nurse educators and clinicians regard CBE as a flexible and practical way to enhance the clinical readiness of nursing graduates by decreasing the time the graduates need to become competent in nursing (Mani, 2025). The AACN Essentials (2021), which lists the ten domains of education (person-centered care, population health, interprofessional collaboration, and informatics), aligns with the Pennsylvania State Board of Nursing licensure requirements and the NCLEX-RN.

Simple-to-Complex Curriculum Sequencing

The Pitt BSN program incorporates a simple-to-complex framework and a competency-based design framework across the four years of study. The foundational sciences and health assessment are covered in the first three years, while multi-system clinical practice develops in the final year. According to Faber et al. (2024), the design framework allows the barriers to cognition and clinical practice to increase progressively as a means of fostering students’ self-confidence. Because the BSN program requires students to move from high school to a well-structured nursing practice, the framework establishes confidence by introducing a series of challenges that increase progressively.

History and Major Concepts of the Organizing Design and Theoretical Framework

A look at the development of CBE since the 1970s provides critical lenses through which to understand the contemporary developments in the design of nursing degree programs with respect to CBE. The origins of CBE in health professions education in the 1970s coincided with the gap in education and practice in nursing. The first formalized nursing education competency-based standards were incorporated in the AACN’s publication of the first Essentials of Baccalaureate Education in Nursing in 1986. In 2021, the AACN revised the Essentials, and for all practice domains, the AACN moved from a discipline-based structure to a domain-based structure.

The historical progression of Competency-Based Education (CBE) is in line with the nursing profession’s adaptation to providing care of increased complexity and technology in a rapidly evolving health care system. Changes to CBE in 2021 were a response to U.S. workforce research that found first-year nursing graduates lacked the readiness to practice interprofessional, data-informed care, and to provide care that is focused on populations (AACN, 2021). The context of these historical frameworks holds significance for the Pitt BSN Program because the BSN curriculum was recently revised to align with the 2021 Essentials. According to Qazi and Al-Mhdawi (2025), there are significantly more positive outcomes from programs that are aligned with the 2021 Essentials in national assessments.

Major Concepts of the AACN Essentials Framework

The AACN Essentials (2021) framework identifies ten core domains of competency for baccalaureate-level nursing practice. Five of these domains are the foundations of nursing practice: knowledge, patient-centered care, population health, and the intersection of scholarship, practice, and quality. The fifth domain is safety (AACN, 2021). The remaining domains are teamwork and collaborative practice, systems-based practice, informatics, and professionalism and personal and professional integrity (AACN, 2021). These ten domains are the essence of contemporary nursing practice and underpin the Pitt BSN curriculum at every level.

Itemizing the domains provides a framework to transition the learner from novice to competent. For example, in the domain of informatics, a learner is expected to progress from a beginner level of EHR to the ability to analyze health-related data to inform decision-making focused on the improvement of patient care (AACN, 2021). O’Rae et al. (2024) observe that graduates of nursing programs that include technology competency integration score significantly higher on the quality of patient care-related decision-making than graduates of those programs lacking technology competency integration. The integration of these frameworks is evident in the Pitt BSN Program’s design and organization of clinical practice and simulation learning, combined with electronic clinical systems and interprofessional practice, teaching, and learning.

DA demonstration of the Organizing Design and Framework Within the Curriculum

Every curriculum needs a theory and a structure to define its elements. In the Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) programs at Pitt, the teaching staff incorporates the learning domains of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN, 2021) into each course curriculum. This means that the learning activity designs reflect the Standards of Professional Nursing Practice.

For instance, in NURS 4040: Evidence-based Practice and Research, students are understood to be participating in the ‘Scholarship for Practice’ domain. In contrast, course activities in NURS 4030: Nursing Leadership and Management are related to the ‘Professionalism’ and ‘Interprofessional Relationships’ domains via the implementation of Cooperative Team Clinical activities.

The completion of the AACN Framework in the Pitt BSN Program is illustrated by the course activities undertaken over the four years of the program. As an example, NURS 1020, introduced in Year 2, presents the Person-Centered Care competencies, plus the teaching of the care concepts, and includes the development of cultural competence. A Supervisory Clinical Placement is undertaken to operationalize the 10 BACN domains (University of Pittsburgh, 2024) in NURS 4050, undertaken in Year 4. Additionally, Billings & Halstead (2020) also express that capstone courses are examples of the implementation of a school’s theoretical framework.

Simple-to-Complex Design Demonstrated Through Curriculum Sequencing

The didactic and clinical aspects of the curriculum show this design as you examine the organization of the program, moving from simple to complex. During the first two years of the program, students learn the components of the science of nursing by studying the fundamentals of nursing (i.e., basic biology, chemistry, nutrition, and health assessment).

In the third and fourth years of the program, students take more clinical courses and further develop sophisticated clinical nursing skills. These courses include Adult Health Nursing II, Community Health Nursing, and Nursing Leadership. These courses are more advanced and demand complex clinical reasoning. This sequencing of courses follows the developmental learning theory, where the foundation of nursing was constructed using basic, simple, and concrete knowledge, and gradually moves to more advanced clinical skills (Oyekunle et al., 2024).

The curriculum’s design demonstrates the same scaffolded approach to outcomes-based construction as the integrated NCLEX preparation activities. The Diagnostic Prep exam (Year 3) assesses foundational mastery, and a Predictor Exam and NCLEX review (3-day) take place at the program’s conclusion (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). Mani (2025) observed that the incorporation of formative assessment checkpoints in a program’s curriculum is associated with significantly higher first-attempt NCLEX pass rates when compared to programs that do not include these checkpoints. The combination of features of the Pitt BSN program strongly suggests that the construction of the nursing curriculum, based on a progression from simple to complex, is theory-based and implemented effectively.

Conclusion

Theoretical frameworks add depth and direction to nursing curriculum organization. The design of the BSN program at the University of Pittsburgh shows a strong correlation to the AACN Essentials framework and its competency-based, simple-to-complex curriculum design developed so far. This correlation can be seen in the course sequences, the specified learning outcomes, clinical experiences, and the assessment. Thus, the examined interdisciplinary program demonstrates the expected standards and rigor of U.S. baccalaureate nursing education.

References

American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2021). The essentials: Core competencies for professional nursing education. https://www.aacnnursing.org/Portals/42/AcademicNursing/pdf/Essentials-2021.pdf

Beiranvand, S., Kermanshahi, S. M. K., Memarian, R., & Almasian, M. (2022). BioMed Central Nursing, 21(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-021-00797-8

Faber, E., Mary, Walter, Bruinink, L. J., Hogeveen, M., & Merriënboer, van. (2024). Effects of adaptive scaffolding on performance, cognitive load, and engagement in game-based learning: A randomized controlled trial. BMC Medical Education, 24(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05698-3

Kumar, V., & Rewari, M. (2022). A responsible approach to higher education curriculum design. International Journal of Educational Reform, 31(4), e11105. https://doi.org/10.1177/10567879221110509

Mani, Z. A. (2025). BioMed Central Nursing, 24(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-025-03319-y

O’Rae, A., Peters, K., Shajani, Z., Burkett, J., & Laing, C. (2024). Improving the evaluation of clinical competence in undergraduate students: Evidence and technology: An integrative review. Journal of Professional Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2024.10.003

Oyekunle, D., Claude, Waliu, A. O., Adekunle, & Ugochukwu, O. M. (2024). Cloud-based adaptive learning system: Virtual reality and augmented reality-assisted educational pedagogy development on clinical simulation. Journal of Digital Health, 49–62. https://doi.org/10.55976/jdh.32024126849-62

Qazi, A., & Al-Mhdawi, M. K. S. (2025). Benchmarking higher education excellence: Insights from QS rankings. Benchmarking: An International Journal. https://doi.org/10.1108/bij-03-2024-0195

University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. (2024). Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. https://www.nursing.pitt.edu/programs/undergraduate-bsn

University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. (2024). BSN program student learning outcomes. https://www.nursing.pitt.edu/programs/bsn/learning-outcomes

University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. (2024). Philosophy, mission, & goals. https://www.nursing.pitt.edu/about/our-philosophy-mission-goals-values