Faculty perceptions of effective practices for utilizing a framework to develop a concept-based curriculum in nursing education

All programs of healthcare education face increasing change and daunting challenges to prepare new graduates for the real world of practice as care providers in complex systems. The necessity for change in nursing education is at a critical level, called on from a variety of sources. New nurses must be able to enter practice as competent, safe, accurate, and compassionate providers in areas of health care that require them to be self-directed learners who can easily adapt to a wide variety of practice settings. Nursing education and nurse educators must be ready, willing, and able to approach and implement reform in programs of nursing. This kind of reform requires making difficult decisions about what content must be retained, what must be let go, and what new information must be included in curriculum change. This reform can be accomplished with a concept-based approach to curriculum re-design. This research determined that nursing faculty members agreed that they utilized effective practices when implementing a concept-based curriculum and that elements of Diamond's Model is an appropriate model that can be utilized for effective implementation of a concept-based curriculum in nursing education. Faculty members who teach in an associate degree program (ASN or ADN) utilize elements of Diamond's Model for curriculum redesign to a greater extent than nursing faculty who teach in a baccalaureate degree program. Furthermore, this study determined that nursing faculty members with a master's degree in Nursing Education are able to utilize data to evaluate and assess the need for curriculum change, reduce redundancy of content, and increase their students' clinical reasoning ability through concept-based curriculum more than nursing faculty members with other educational backgrounds. Finally, this study demonstrated that nursing faculty members who teach utilizing a concept-based approach from 3-5 years perceive greater use of effective practice and effectiveness of implementation more than the faculty who taught longer than 10 years utilizing a concept-based approach.