School of Nursing Progress Report (2017)

Analysis of the one year progress report on the review of the Ph.D. in Nursing program reveals the following opportunities for a dashboard:

On student recruitment#

The progress report includes comments such as:

  • "We will target recruitment efforts with the goal to admit five students annually, of which two would be international students and three from Hawai′i and/or the mainland.",
  • "In the future, a special emphasis will be placed on recruiting BS nursing students in the UH Mānoa Honors Program."
  • "We aim to start the program on a small scale of 3-5 students per year for the first 2-3 years and then gradually increase annual admission to approximately 10 students."

Each of these can be easily tracked with a dashboard widget.

On student funding#

The report says,

  • "The DON is committed to supporting three to five qualified applicants for the revised, full-time PhD Program and will provide them a graduate research assistant (GRA) appointment for all three years of the program.", and "Since the curriculum has been shortened to three years, and we anticipate providing three years of support to GRA students, we expect that attrition rates should be low as a result of a lack of student funding."
  • "We expect half of the class to be funded as GRAs. The others will be self-funded, or funded by some other entities (such as agency/employer, organizations, US military, or their home country). Student funding support for a couple PhD Nursing students will be provided from extramural funding of the DON. The endowed Frances A. Matsuda Fellowship in Nursing (UHF) and SONDH Global Health Program (RCUH) will contribute to tuition and other educational expenses, or graduate assistantship salaries on an ongoing basis. Each of these programs will fund one GRA student for three years. In addition, we are actively seeking funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and other entities."

The dashboard can track how many qualified applicants are offered GRAs for all years, the rate of attrition, and the categories of funding assistance obtained by each student in each academic year.

On program assessment and evaluation#

The report states:

Key indicators for the aggregate PhD student body will be monitored, including: student demographics, program completion, on time graduation, scholarly productivity (including publications, presentations, and funded grants), awards & honors, number of students who go on to pursue post- doctoral work, scholarship and contributions to nursing science post- graduation. In addition, each course that is offered will be evaluated by the students taking the course as well as the faculty who teaches the course. The information from this dual evaluation will be used to continuously refine and improve the curriculum as well as the operating procedures for the PhD program.

This paragraph yields a wealth of measures that can be tracked via a dashboard.