NURS FPX 6108 Assessment 3 Curriculum Theory, Frameworks, and Models
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Capella University
NURS- FPX6108
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NURS FPX 6108 Assessment 3 Curriculum Theory, Frameworks, and Models
To establish an effective nursing curriculum, there is a need for solid theoretical foundations and organizing principles. Theoretical bases have an impact on how nursing curricula are designed, as they directly relate to the order of nursing knowledge taught and assessed. University of Pittsburgh’s BSN Program is a competency-based curriculum consistent with the AACN (2021) Essentials framework. This is based on the information shared by Kumar and Rewari. As put in (2022), the curriculum design should consider the institution’s mission and learner needs. This article discusses the organizing, theoretical, and conceptual design that pertains to Pitt’s BSN curriculum.
What Curriculum Framework Does the University of Pittsburgh BSN Program Use?
The University of Pittsburgh BSN program uses a competency-based education (CBE) model aligned with the AACN Essentials Framework. This curriculum emphasizes patient-centered care, clinical reasoning, leadership, informatics, evidence-based practice, and professional nursing competencies required for modern healthcare environments.
Curriculum Identification, Organization, and Learner Population
To assess whether the nursing program being taught at the University of Pittsburgh is right for you, you will need to first consider the following factors: the program of nursing taught (institutional context) and the target population to be served by the program (recipients). The University of Pittsburgh offers a Bachelor of Science – Nursing (BSN) degree, which is designed for students who have just finished high school, and teaches them how to become a generalist nurse at the entry-level. This program is a four-year full-time education program at the University of Pittsburgh campus in Pittsburgh that will prepare the graduate to apply for the NCLEX-RN exam upon completion of the program (University of Pittsburgh, 2024).
To be successful in a rapidly changing and complex healthcare world, a diverse and appropriately prepared population of learners is needed to help support the nursing workforce. The target population of learners for the University of Pittsburgh’s nursing program includes students entering from high school into the nursing program and other school students who transfer into the nursing program (referred to as internal transfers) (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). But this nursing program that offers students over 1200 hours of clinical practice in hospitals, clinics, and the community will not just be theoretical; it will also be an extensive hands-on professional preparation (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). Consequently, the nursing program has a diverse population of learners and offers them a strong foundation in theory, as well as a wide range of practical and professional preparation for the generalist nurse market today.
Description of the Selected Health Care Curriculum
Description of a nursing curriculum is based on the context of the institution and the community served by a program. The University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing is the oldest nursing school in the United States (U.S.) and has been involved in baccalaureate degree education in nursing since 1939 (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). In Pittsburgh, PA, and a part of the Victoria Building, which additionally has a partnership with UPMC, a local health system offering a wide variety of clinical education to its students. The institution and program are consequently well equipped to prepare nurses, in part because of the rich array of academic resources available in some of the faculty’s research-active faculty members and the many ways to experience real-world clinical practice.
The Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree program is a comprehensive pre-licensure nursing program. Nurses are welcome to the program from all healthcare work settings. The target audience will be traditional high school graduates admitted into the program and current students transferring from other universities (University of Pittsburgh 2024). A nurse will have more than 1,200 hours of supervised clinical practice in various settings, including hospitals, clinics, and the community, as part of the education program (2024, University of Pittsburgh). Studies show that participants who had multiple chances to participate in valuable and hands-on clinical learning experiences during their nursing education had developed nursing competency more effectively than students without extensive clinical learning during their nursing education (Beiranvand et al., 2022).
Fundamental Organizing Design and Theoretical Framework
By determining the structure of a curriculum, a clear understanding of the construction of learning experience can be obtained to contribute to the development of the competence of a nurse as a nurse. The AACN (2021) The Essentials: Core Competencies for Professional Nursing is the core organizing model for the Pitt BSN program and is a professional nursing competency model. It leads to a clear linkage between all courses, assessments, and clinical experiences to measurable professional competencies (AACN, 2021). The most suitable approach to competency-based education (CBE) is for programs in the health professions, where it is necessary for students to be able to demonstrate skills.
It is logical for the BSN program at Pitt to be competency-based, as nursing needs to have standardized and verifiable skills at the time of graduation. CBE frameworks, in addition to enhancing the clinical preparedness of nursing graduates, can also help reduce the duration required for graduates to attain competency within the hospital environment. The ten domains in the AACN Essentials (2021) are in alignment with the domain and licensing requirements of the Pennsylvania State Board of Nursing and the national NCLEX-RN exam: person-centered care, population health, interprofessional collaboration, and informatics.
Simple-to-Complex Curriculum Sequencing
The Pitt BSN program is competency-based and simple to complex, which takes four years of academic program. The first two years focus on basic sciences, health assessment, and the third and fourth years intensify and build up to multi-system complexity in health care. Faber et al. (2024) suggest that this is a step-wise approach and helps foster confidence among learners when challenged with higher cognitive and clinical demands. The staged nature of the program from high school to challenging and immediate involvement in the nursing world is particularly fitting.
History and Major Concepts of the Organizing Design and Theoretical Framework
An understanding of how CBE developed, starting from the evolution of the 1970’s, will help the reader understand why CBE is currently popular when designing nursing degree programs. CBE had its roots in health professions education in the 1970s in response to discrepancies between the scope and content of school-based education and how nurses function in clinical situations. In 1986, the AACN published the first competency-based expectations for the nursing school setting known as Essentials of Baccalaureate Education; in 2021, the AACN published an updated version of the Essentials, which was now discipline to domain based, as the standard for all practice environments.
Historical Development of Competency-Based Education (CBE) – in the nursing profession, it is a response to the more complex and technology-oriented nursing care they deliver within an ever-changing health care landscape. Modifications to CBE for 2021 reflect the data from the national workforce that shows a lack of preparedness for new graduates to be interprofessional, use data to guide care, and provide care at a population level (AACN, 2021). The historical context of this is very important for the Pitt BSN Program, in that this program recently documented changes to the BSN curriculum to move it closer to the model of the 2021 Essentials. There are significantly better outcomes of 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
Ten competency domains of the AACN (2021) Essentials framework are the way of thinking about how to establish professional nursing as a career at the baccalaureate level; five key domains are knowledge for nursing practice, patient-centered care, population health, scholarship/practice, and quality/safety (AACN, 2021). There are four other domains that address interprofessional collaboration, system-based practice, informatics and technology, and professionalism and personal and professional leadership (AACN, 2021). These 10 domains of nursing encompass the most up-to-date nursing practices and align with each level of the BSN program curricula at Pitt.
Programs have the option of tracking individual student progress within a program from novice to program exit on “sub competencies” within each of the Domains. For instance, informatics students should go beyond learning to use the electronic health record (EHR) and learn to analyze health information to ensure an adequate base for improving patient care (AACN, 2021). In the study, O’Rae et al. (2024) found that students who graduated from programs in which technology skills were explicitly mapped to patient outcomes reported significantly higher scores on decisions made by students than did students who graduated from programs that did not map technology skills to patient outcomes. The use of simulation laboratories, electronic clinical systems, and interprofessional practice throughout the educational experiences of the students is guided by these overarching concepts.
Demonstration of the Organizing Design and Framework Within the Curriculum
The operationalized theoretical framework provides a meaning for the whole curriculum via its physical structure and its material content. To ensure that learning activities align with the American Association of Colleges of Nursing’s (AACN) competency domains (2021) for professional practice, the content of the Pitt Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) curriculum is represented in every course. Another example is in NURS 4040: Evidence-based Practice and Research, in which the course is directly related to the “Scholarship for Practice” domain in that the students assess research articles for merit. NURS 4030: Nursing Leadership and Management, the course, is applicable to the domains of “Professionalism” and “Interprofessional Relationships” in the context of team-based clinical scenarios.
Examples of uses of the AACN framework in all 4 years of the Pitt BSN program are provided. NURS 1020 – Person-Centered Care introduces Person-Centred Care skills in Year 2 through structured meetings with patients as well as cultural awareness training. NURS 4050 is a clinical immersion course with direct supervision where the 10 BACN domains are integrated in Year 4 (University of Pittsburgh, 2024). Furthermore, Billings & Halstead (2020) note that capstone experiences provide strong evidence that the practical application of a school’s theoretical framework (what is taught in courses) has been successfully completed.
Simple-to-Complex Design Demonstrated Through Curriculum Sequencing
The development of the organizational structure of the program, from simple to complex, can be observed from within the clinical/didactic curriculum, from the first to the fourth year of the program. In Year 1 and Year 2, fundamental science (biology, chemistry, nutrition, and health assessment) is taught to lay a scientific foundation for Nursing. Courses in Years 3 and 4 become more clinical and build upon higher-level clinical reasoning skills with the inclusion of Adult Health Nursing II, Community Health Nursing, and Leadership courses. The sequence of the courses is based on the principle of developmental learning, whereby nursing competency is built sequentially from the concrete to the abstract and clinical judgment (Oyekunle et al., 2024).
The integrated NCLEX preparation activities, which are threaded throughout the entire program, serve to further demonstrate the scaffolded, outcomes-based design of the program’s curriculum. The Diagnostic Prep exam takes place in the third year, which highlights the building of foundation skills, and at the end of the program, a Predictor Exam and NCLEX review (3-day). In this study, Mani (2025) observed that NCLEX first-attempt pass rates were significantly greater in programs with formative assessment checkpoints than in programs with no checkpoints. The overall structure of the Pitt BSN program, taken together, demonstrates a simple-to-complex progression of the content of the BSN curriculum that is not only rooted in theory but also is successful in practice.
Conclusion
A nursing course is coherent, has direction, and a professional purpose when it has theoretical frameworks and organizing designs. The competency-based, simple to complex organizing design has good correlation with the AACN Essentials in the University of Pittsburgh’s BSN program. 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 is such a good fit that it could be a good example of what baccalaureate nursing education in the United States should be, and is reflective of the rigor of the program overall.
Related Assessment For This Class:
NURS FPX 6108 Assessment 2
NURS FPX 6108 Assessment 5
NURS FPX 6108 Assessment 4
References For NURS FPX 6108 Assessment 3
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). From clinical expert nurse to part-time clinical nursing instructor: Design and evaluation of a competency-based curriculum with structured mentoring: A mixed methods study. 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). Transitioning to competency-based education in nursing: A scoping review of curriculum review and revision strategies. 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
Professor
Dr. Mustafa Kayyali, PhD
Dr. Adebusola A. Obafemi, EdD
Prof. Areewan Klunklin, RN, PhD
Dr. Zahra Shajani, EdD, RN, MPH, CCHN
FAQs
What curriculum model is used in the University of Pittsburgh BSN program?
The program follows a competency-based education model aligned with AACN Essentials.
Is the Pitt BSN curriculum accredited?
Yes, the curriculum is accredited through CCNE standards.
How many clinical hours are included?
Students complete more than 1,200 supervised clinical practice hours.
What Is Competency-Based Education?
Competency-based education is a learning model that measures student success through demonstrated skills and professional competencies rather than course completion alone. In nursing education, this approach ensures graduates are practice-ready and clinically competent.