Program Learning Outcomes

The School of Nursing faculty supports the goals and mission of the College of Health and Human Development and the University, which include teaching, scholarship, and service to the university and community. The philosophy of the School expresses beliefs about human beings, health, the environment, and nursing.

Program Outcomes (Goals)

1. To provide quality nursing programs which are accessible to a diverse student population.
2. To prepare graduates who can provide culturally sensitive and competent care within a framework of scientific and professional accountability and function independently in a variety of settings.
3. To prepare graduates with the necessary foundation for further education and specialization within their chosen career path and who demonstrate commitment to lifelong learning for personal and professional growth.
4. To establish and maintain innovative educational partnerships to promote health and meet societal imperatives.
5. To be recognized as a center of excellence in nursing education.

Nursing Philosophy

Human beings are multi-dimensional, dynamic, open systems in continual interaction with the environment. They are complex wholes who seek balance through their unique abilities. They exhibit age, cultural, spiritual, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation diversity. Accountable for their actions, human beings have the potential for self-direction and rational decision making as they maintain, preserve, and promote health throughout the lifespan.

Health is a dynamic process—a way of life—that involves complex responses between internal and external factors. It is the integration of the multiple dimensions of life, which when working in harmony create wholeness and lead to a sense of well-being and satisfaction. Health is influenced by individual genetic endowments, levels of development, lifestyles, and sociocultural and physical environments, and is manifested as a pattern. Health can also refer to the needs of a larger community or society.

The environment is composed of internal and external components. The internal environment includes physical, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual realities within human beings. The external environment includes social organizations and systems, such as economics, politics, and policy development, as well as the physical environment. Environment is also the aggregate of societal expectations, reflected in the intracultural and intercultural interaction of human beings within families, groups, and communities.

Nursing is a unique, practice-oriented discipline that meets a societal goal. The science of nursing is concerned with critical thinking, problem solving, and the application of knowledge. The art of nursing involves interacting, caring, and valuing. The goals of nursing contribute to health enhancement via health promotion, risk reduction, and disease prevention. The ultimate goal of nursing is to optimize health by interpreting and influencing responses to health and illness. Attainment of optimal health requires collaboration between nurse and client as well as with professionals from other disciplines. Professional nursing involves provision of compassionate patient-centered care—using the nursing process, employing evidence-based practice, applying quality improvement, working in inter and intradisciplinary teams, and using informatics.

The nursing process is a dynamic and on-going means of addressing clinical problems. A collaborative endeavor, it depends on nurse and client observations, perceptions, and consensual validations of physiological, psychosocial, emotional, and spiritual needs. This process requires nurse, client, family, and members of collaborating health care teams to work together. The nursing process involves:

• Assessing factors that influence the position of the client, group, community, or population on a health-illness continuum;
• Determining actual or potential health problem(s);
• Establishing mutually acceptable goals;
• Intervening by promoting adaptation through modification of influencing factors or increasing the coping response;
• Evaluating the position on the health-illness continuum to reaffirm or modify nursing interventions.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) in the Nursing Program

The expected SLOs of the Nursing programs are derived from the SCHOOL OF NURSING mission, goals, philosophy, and practice model; program goals; and, professional nursing standards and guidelines.

Practice Model

The School of Nursing practice model is grounded in the assumption that nurses practice as members of collaborative teams. The model applies to nursing practice throughout the continuum of care, and works to maximize the health of human beings in diverse communities. It also applies to practice where nurses manage care of individuals and their families within complex environments of hospital and other healthcare systems.

SON Conceptual Model

In the center of the SON Conceptual Model is the practice model (see Figure 1). The inner circle depicts the key elements of care, the population base (individual/family, community, systems/organizations), which are interrelated. The model is aimed at enhancing understanding nursing’s focus and the process by which nurses evaluate health indicators to develop or use intervention that can maximize health. Nurses are integral members of intradisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams, providing a broad approach to patient care and community problems. Processes of assessment, diagnosis, outcome identification, planning, interventions, and evaluation-when systematically applied-facilitate use of the nursing process at all levels of practice.

Thus, the three central interwoven circles show the levels of population-based practice. Systems, community, and individual/family are nested within population-based care that is compassionate and evidence-based, which is applied at all points of the nursing process. The ultimate goal of nursing care is healthy people in healthy communities. For individual patients, success is measured by improvement in or maintenance of health; for the community, success is measured by improvement in overall community health and quality of life indicators. Focusing on these goals and evaluating patient and community outcomes completes the nursing process and allows modification of the plan of care as needed.

Teaching/ Learning Philosophy

Teaching is a complex, interactive, and outcome-focused operation. Based on a body of evidence, it promotes disequilibrium and contributes to learners’ growth. Well applied evidence-based teaching strategies take into account learning goals, student diversity (including learning styles), and faculty and student resources. Teaching strategies are matched to student learning styles, reflect on-going formative and summative assessment, and are driven by the ideal of continuous improvement. The teacher focuses on learners and provides environments that facilitate student learning where desired learner outcomes (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor) are achieved.

Liberal Learning

Liberal learning that prepares students to live responsible, productive, and creative lives is the foundation of professional nursing education. Nursing education fosters a well-grounded intellectual resilience, a disposition toward lifelong learning, and an acceptance of responsibility for the ethical consequences of ideas and actions (Statement on liberal learning, 1998). Liberal education requires a respect for truth, recognition of the importance of context (e.g., historical, cultural), and examination of connections among formal learning, citizenship, and community service.

Integration of liberal education and nursing education comes from faculty members guiding students to build bridges between key concepts in both. In a practice discipline such as nursing, assisting students to make these connections is the basis or foundation for development of clinical judgment skills required for professional nursing practice (American Association of Colleges of Nursing [AACN], 2008). Students must achieve competency with critical thinking, communication, ethical decision-making, evidence-based practice, and information literacy. Information literacy enables students to recognize when information is needed and locate, appraise and effectively incorporate salient information.

Ideally, nursing education takes place in an environment that promotes true transdisciplinary experiences where individuals from each discipline show mutual understanding and respect towards and for the other’s discipline and contribution. Such transdisciplinary practice is patient-centered, results oriented and enhances care effectiveness for patients (Greiner & Knebel, 2003).