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Capella University

NURS-FPX6108 Curriculum Overview: Design, Develop and Evaluate

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Curriculum Theory, Frameworks, and Models

The establishment of an effective nursing curriculum relies on solid theoretical foundations and designing organizing principles. The theoretical base will impact the order in which the knowledge will be presented in nursing curricula as well as on the manner in which it will be taught and evaluated. The University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing’s B.S. Program is a competency-based curriculum based on the AACN (2021) Essentials framework. As per the statements of Kumar & Rewari. According to Kumar & Rewari (2022), the inclusion of institutional missions and learner needs in curriculum design is a must. This article describes the organizing, theoretical, and conceptual design of the Pitt BSN curriculum.

Description of the Selected Health Care Curriculum

The context of the institution and the community served by a program informs a description of a nursing curriculum. For instance, the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing has been offering baccalaureate education in nursing since 1939 and is one of the oldest nursing schools in the United States (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). It is within the Victoria Building in Pittsburgh, PA, and has a partnership with UPMC where students can receive a broad spectrum of clinical education. As a result, the rich academic resources in research-active faculty members and many different ways in which to experience real-world clinical practice make this institution and program particularly well suited for preparing nurses.

The Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree program is a complete program in nursing leading to the award of the baccalaureate degree. The program is an opportunity for nurses from all healthcare work settings. Traditional high school graduates admitted to the program and transfer students from other universities will be the target audience (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). A nursing student will complete more than 1,200 hours of supervised clinical practice in hospitals, clinics, and the community (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). Research has shown that valuable and experience-based learning opportunities during clinical education have better prepared students to develop nursing competency than those with lower numbers of clinical education opportunities during their nursing training (Beiranvand et al., 2022).

Fundamental Organizing Design and Theoretical Framework

By determining the structure of a curriculum, it is possible to better understand how learning experiences are built to develop a nurse’s ability as a nurse. The major organizing structure for the Pitt BSN program is a professional nursing competency model derived from that outlined in The Essentials: Core Competencies for Professional Nursing (2021) by the AACN. It leads to all courses, assessments, and clinical experiences being consistent with measurable professional competencies (AACN, 2021). Programs in the health professions where students must learn certain skills are thought to be best suited to competency-based education (CBE).

Nursing in particular needs the skills to be verifiable and standardized upon program completion; therefore, it should be designed as a competency-based program at Pitt. In addition to that, CBE frameworks facilitate nursing graduates’ clinical readiness as well as reduce the time spent in acquiring competency in the hospital environment (Mani, 2025). Ten domains were established in the AACN Essentials (2021), including the domains of person-centered care, population health, interprofessional collaboration, and informatics, which are all consistent with the requirements of the Pennsylvania State Board of Nursing and national NCLEX-RN exam.

Simple-to-Complex Curriculum Sequencing

Both a competency-based design and a simple-to-complex design over four years of academic study are utilized throughout the Pitt BSN program. This program is designed so as to increasingly build upon its core sciences and health assessment content in years one and two, with multi-systems of clinical practice building on those foundations in years three and four. They describe this as a staged progression to build learners’ confidence as they tackle increasingly higher cognitive and/or clinical demands (Faber et al., 2024). The staged design is very appropriate for a program that leads into the nursing realm and is quite challenging in both its level of difficulty and the entry points it provides.

History and Major Concepts of the Organizing Design and Theoretical Framework

Knowing the evolution of CBE from the 1970s helps better understand the reason that CBE is prevalent today in designing nursing degree programs. CBE emerged in health professions education in the 1970’s as an attempt to address the issue of the mismatch between what was being taught in the schools and what nurses were doing on the wards. The AACN first published the Essentials of Baccalaureate Education in 1986 as formalized competency-based expectations for all nursing schools, and in 2021 the AACN offered the Essentials in its updated format to be the standard for all practice environments.

The historical evolution of Competency-Based Education (CBE) is relevant to the nursing profession reacting to a rapidly changing healthcare environment with more complex and technology-based care. The changes to CBE in 2021 were made based on national workforce data that indicated there was a gap in how prepared new graduates are to participate in interprofessional care, to use data for the provision of care, and to provide population-based care (AACN, 2021). It is important to consider the historical context of this, as, recently, the Pitt BSN Program has undergone changes to its BSN curriculum to better fit within the framework of the 2021 Essentials. There are significantly better outcomes for graduates from programs that follow the 2021 Essentials on national assessments, as noted by Qazi and Al-Mhdawi (2025).

Major Concepts of the AACN Essentials Framework

The AACN (2021) Essentials framework is the methodology for building professional nursing as a career for the Baccalaureate degree level; five of the ten core competency domains are: knowledge for nursing practice, patient-centered care, population health, scholarship/practice, and quality/safety (AACN, 2021). The other four domains address the following: interprofessional collaboration, system-based practice, informatics and technology, and professionalism and personal and professional leadership (AACN, 2021). These ten domains of nursing coalesce a picture of what nursing is today and align with all levels of the Pitt BSN program curricula.

Programs can follow students through their development as learners from novice to program exit based on “sub competencies” in each of the Domains. For instance, informatics students should learn to move beyond using an electronic health record (EHR) and understand how to analyze health data to give an appropriate foundation for improving the quality of patient care (AACN, 2021). In the study conducted by O’Rae et al. (2024), the mathematics of technology competencies mapped to patient outcomes showed that the competency scores for decision-making were significantly higher for students who graduated from the programs where competencies were mapped to patient outcomes compared to those where competencies were not mapped to patient outcomes. These ideas have helped direct the incorporation of simulation lab experience, electronic clinical systems, and interprofessional practice within the education of the Pitt BSN program.

Demonstration of the Organizing Design and Framework within the Curriculum

An operationalized theoretical framework gives meaning to the whole curriculum in physical construction and content. Pitt Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) curricula integrate the American Association of Colleges of Nursing’s (AACN) (2021) competency domains, which are included in each course to ensure the learning activities are in sync with the standards for professional practice. For example, the course NURS 4040: Evidence-Based Practice and Research is directly connected to the “Scholarship for practice” as students discuss articles from research studies on the merits of the project. The course Nursing Leadership and Management (NURS 4030) is related to the “Professionalism” and “Interprofessional Relationships” domains via team-based clinical scenarios.

Students will see examples of how AACN is integrated throughout the Pitt BSN program across all four years through course examples. NURS 1020, Person-Centered Care Skills, is a class for Year 2 students that builds Person-Centered Care skills via structured interactions with a patient and cultural awareness training. NURS 4050 integrates these 10 BACN domains in a clinical immersion experience with direct supervision in Year 4 (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). Also, Billings & Halstead (2020) validate that capstone experiences provide strong evidence that the practical application of a school’s theory (what is taught in the classroom) is successful.

Simple-to-Complex Design Demonstrated Through Curriculum Sequencing

The development of the basic to the more complex organization of the program is demonstrated throughout the clinical/didactic curriculum in each year of the program. Basic science like Biology, Chemistry, Nutrition, Health assessment, etc. is taught in courses in Year 1 and Year 2, which lay down the scientific foundation of nursing. Courses in Years 3 and 4 will be more clinical, and courses like Adult Health Nursing II, Community Health Nursing, and Leadership will introduce students to more complex nursing courses that challenge students to develop higher-level clinical reasoning skills. The courses are sequenced in accordance with the developmental learning principle as competence in nursing is developed in a sequence from concrete knowledge to abstract clinical judgment (Oyekunle et al., 2024).

The integrated NCLEX preparation activities that are threaded throughout the entire program serve to further demonstrate the scaffolded, outcomes-based design of the program’s curriculum. There is a Diagnostic Prep exam at the end of Year 3 to test for foundational mastery, followed by a Predictor Exam and NCLEX review (3-day) at the end of the program (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). Mani (2025) showed a significantly greater first-attempt pass rate for programs with formative assessment checkpoints in the curriculum than for programs with no formative assessment checkpoints. The aforementioned structure in the Pitt BSN program collectively demonstrates that the simple-to-complex program development of the BSN curriculum is not only theoretical, but is successfully applied in practice.

Conclusion

Two critical elements that give a curriculum coherence, direction, and professional purpose for a nursing program are theoretical frameworks and organizing designs. They have developed a competency-based, currently simple-to-complex organizing design that is well aligned with the AACN Essentials framework in the BSN program offered by The University of Pittsburgh. This can be demonstrated by how well course sequencing, learning outcomes, clinical experiences, and methods of assessment all show evidence-based and deliberately developed decisions for the design of the curriculum. This program’s alignment makes it a suitable model of baccalaureate nursing education in the United States and demonstrates the quality of its overall alignment.