The Capstone Experience from Student and Faculty Perspectives

Introduction:  The summative experience for students at the School of Nursing, the Capstone project, is designed to focus students' academic progress, future expertise, and ultimate leadership and practice skills as expert practitioners. The process of conceptualizing this project, once a challenge for our students, now begins during the application process.

Proposed Change: Students were entering the DNP program with only a vague idea of what topic they would explore for their Capstone project.  The DNP Curriculum Committee recognized that strategies needed to be developed to help students identify the topic earlier in the program.

Implementation Strategies:  In preadmission interviews, prospective students are asked to identify potential capstone topics. Upon admission student must complete a “boot camp”. This is a series of on-line tutorials including: use of APA, introduction to the electronic campus, the electronic literature search, and articles focusing on reading and understanding research. Students must also have completed a graduate level statistics course in the past 5 years or complete our on-line course. Each course builds upon previous courses.  By completion of core courses students develop their capstone proposals. Salient courses include: Scientific Underpinnings, Analytic Methods, Population Health, and Clinical Projects 1 and 2 (Proposal Development). During the Clinical Project courses, students identify a committee chairperson, an expert in the field, and a project mentor, the Capstone Committee. The committee approves the Capstone project proposal, and helps the student complete the Institutional Review Board submission. Capstone 1 includes implementation of the project; Capstone 2 involves its evaluation.

Evaluation: After implementation of the boot camp and early identification of the capstone topic, the attrition rate for the program decreased from 29% to 14%. The length of time to complete the Project has decreased by several months. Students have been awarded external grants, have presented their projects at national meetings, and one student has published in a nursing journal.

Summary:  This presentation describes a student's journey from the birth of a practice question through implementation, analysis, and the dissemination of the results. Challenges faced by students, faculty, and the university will be explored.  Resolution of these challenges will be discussed.