The Write Stuff

Students enter nursing graduate programs with varying levels of competence in writing.  Faculty expect these beginning graduate students to at least be competent in their academic writing ability, and do not expect to have to teach students basic writing structure (informative essay, persuasive essay, sentence structure, correct punctuation and grammar, etc.).  However, nursing faculty report a decline in entering students’ writing skills over the past decade, making it increasingly difficult for many students to develop into novice scholarly writers. 

Effective written communication is an essential component to success in a graduate nursing education program.  However, the increased content in graduate-level clinical nursing courses has resulted in a decrease in formal scholarly written assignments and an increase in less formal written assignments, e.g. case studies and reflective journaling, in the courses at the School.  Where once it was expected that all courses have at least one scholarly written assignment, faculty removed the majority of these scholarly assignments and replaced them with non-scholarly writing assignments, or assignments that did not require writing at all.

In light of this, faculty at the School examined the feasibility and necessity of re-introducing writing as a component of the graduate education program (Writing Across the Curriculum).  Faculty were surveyed to assess their perception of student writing ability at the start of the student’s graduate program.  Next, a subgroup of faculty evaluated students’ written work using the Academic Writing Rubric.  Then, a writing expert evaluated the students’ written work using the same tool.  Mean scores were compared and demonstrated that a gap actually does exist. 

Based on the results of this study, the faculty at the School developed a plan to integrate writing assignments throughout the curriculum.  This new curriculum thread will be implemented in 2011 as the School revises its MSN and post-master’s DNP curricula into a straight-through DNP curriculum.  This presentation will describe the results of the study, and the multi-step approach to weave WAC through the DNP curriculum.