706 - Square Pegs and Round Holes – Adapting NextGen with your LMS

The National Council for Licensure Examination – Registered Nurse (NCLEX-RN) will launch a new test design effective April 2023. Nursing faculty are working to create and revise current test items to strengthen clinical judgment in entry-level nursing. We will discuss our program’s implementation and illustrate the transformation of questions to NextGen.

Current Learning Management Systems (LMS) do not necessarily lend themselves to NextGen item formats. These barriers are not easily remedied, so the solutions to these challenges become the burden of the nursing faculty. Do we have a budget to purchase an entire new testing platform? What is the faculty learning curve to implement and operate a new testing platform? Why won’t our LMS just agree to help us design NextGen item formats? These questions and more were not getting answered quickly, or at all, so we knew we had to move forward to ensure our students were ready for clinical judgment, NCLEX-RN, and careers in nursing. We recognized early in this process that we would have to be more creative in order to adapt NextGen item formats in our current LMS. Our team attended numerous conferences, webinars, and purchased books to help us proactively implement ways to transform current test questions to clinical judgment questions. We did not let these challenges and pitfalls halt us from moving forward.

We already had a team approach in place for writing, revising, reviewing and evaluating test items. This process was now escalated to ensure test items included clinical judgment in various formats to align as much as possible with NextGen items. As a team, we decided how many NextGen items would be in included on each exam for each semester of our nursing program, increasing the number of items as the program progresses. As we continue our regular test review meetings, faculty are prepared to share, review, and revise items to align better with clinical judgment. While we continue to face challenges with some NextGen item formats in our LMS, we utilize lecture time to teach and reinforce the clinical judgment model and attempt to mimic the formats that our LMS does not support. We will continue to track item analysis data to help us refine the process to ensure our graduates are better equipped to make clinical judgments at the bedside.