Date of Award

2006

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

Abstract

Practical nursing programs have a responsibility to the health care workforce as well to the health care consumer, to identify and address potential barriers to success on nurse licensure examinations. The purpose of this study was to identify programmatic factors that affect practical nursing student pass rates on the NCLEX-PN examination. The study examined relationships between NCLEX-PN scores of practical nursing students and the percentage of faculty contracted to teach on a full-time basis, the course sequencing of the anatomy and physiology course, scores on the PSB admission examination, the number of weeks a student is enrolled in the practical nursing program, the percentage of faculty who are considered to be credentialed and the number of years of teaching experience of nurse faculty. A quantitative research design was conducted utilizing archival data. Academic records of 1,375 practical nursing graduates from 2000 and 2001 were mined for student-related data points of interest to this study. Faculty information was obtained from faculty data profile forms and official college transcripts. All identifying information was completely removed and all data was kept completely anonymous. Logistic regression analysis was utilized to measure the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable. The results of the study indicated a significant relationship between several of the variables---the number of PSB scores below the 30 th percentile, the enrollment time of the practical nursing students, and the credentialing level of the practical nurse faculty---and pass rates on the NCLEX-PN licensure examination. Course sequencing of the anatomy and physiology course and percentage of faculty contracted to teach on a full-time basis were not significant in predicting success on the NCLEX-PN examination.

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