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School of Nursing Curriculum Framework and Guiding Document

Belief Statements

The curriculum is organized to facilitate student learning. The beginning courses provide a foundation for the nursing major. Course content and learning experiences progress from the individual to the family and community, from simple to complex, from faculty-facilitated to student-directed learning, and from theory to application. Teaching and learning are highly interactive and multidimensional processes. Our faculty design and facilitate experiences to guide students to integrate theoretical concepts into practice, foster a spirit of inquiry, and expand critical and reflective thinking in nursing. This design enables students to acquire attitudes, cognition, and the essential skills needed to develop the knowledge and behaviors that comprise the professional nursing role.

The curriculum framework provides direction for the selection and organization of learning experiences to achieve program outcomes and competencies. The curriculum is centered on the philosophy that guides the curriculum design by ensuring that the common threads necessary for nursing practice are addressed and developed progressively across the course of study.

The five integral threads interwoven across the nursing curriculum are: Clinical Judgment, Communication, Experiential Learning, Person-Centered Nursing Care, and Professional Identity and Leadership. They are defined as follows:

Integral Threads

Clinical Judgment

Professional nurses are expected to deliver patient-centered, safe, quality care while working as members of collaborative interprofessional teams and change agents. To deliver truly transformative care, nurses must be able to recognize health risks of vulnerable patient populations, make sound clinical judgments in ever-changing practice environments, and advocate for access and equality in care. Clinical judgment is “the process by which nurses make decisions based on nursing knowledge (evidence, theories, ways/patterns of knowing), other disciplinary knowledge, critical thinking, and clinical reasoning” (Matetti, 2019, as cited in AACN, 2021, p. 12). One essential component of clinical judgment is clinical decision-making. Students must develop the competence to assess community, systems, organizational, environmental and individual variables to make informed clinical decisions that lead to improved patient outcomes (Muntean, 2012).

Learning to think and act as professional nurses involves using clinical and reflective judgment resulting in a reasoned, analytic, cyclical process which incorporates scientific evidence, objective thought, contextual elements, values, and ever-changing conditions. Boise State University’s School of Nursing curriculum incorporates many methods of discovery in student learning experiences but emphasizes clinical judgment as a cornerstone of safe, equitable, evidence-based nursing practice.

References

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

Muntean, W. J. (2012) Nursing clinical decision-making: A literature review. NCSBN Research Library.

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