Developing a Homegrown DNP Portfolio – Lessons Learned

Professionals have used portfolios for decades to highlight evidence of their accomplishments.  Likewise, in nursing education portfolios are used to document student learning and evaluating clinical competence. That being said, the diversity among proprietary products and purposes accounts for confusion related to the usefulness among students, faculties, and potential employers. The objectives and curriculum of the School of Nursing (SON) DNP program reflects the competencies of the AACN Essentials of Doctoral Education for Advanced Nursing Practice as well as the NONPF DNP NP competencies. The SON DNP portfolio is both academic – a collection of student work representing a selection of performance – and competency-based in that a purposeful collection of student work that reflects or provides evidence of meeting competencies within the 8 Essentials are collected along with other relevant data. End of semester reflective summaries are provided by students. Likewise, the folder housing the scholarly project demonstrates the progression across semesters. The portfolios are populated beginning with the 2^nd semester and evaluated by student advisors and course faculty to assess student progress, validating competencies longitudinally. Hence, formative evaluations and potentially summative evaluations, i.e., program evaluations, can be achieved in part using the portfolios. Using Survey Monkey, graduates from the first DNP cohort evaluated the portfolio as to what was most valuable and what changes they would make. Strengths and weaknesses will be discussed and compared with those found in the literature to include faculty buy-in, reliability issues, and resistance due to unclear purposes.

The development of the DNP student portfolio was the collective work of DNP faculty facilitated by a professor of informatics. The electronic portfolio template is saved to the student’s desktop and downloaded in a zip file. Standard Windows file procedures are used for the 11 folders. Directions appear in word format as well as via a Camtasia presentation and are reiterated when students are on campus; a recent DNP graduate describes and demonstrates the portfolio using her own DNP student experiences as an exemplar. A demonstration of the DNP student portfolio will be provided for participants.