Early Identification of At-Risk LPN-to-RN Students

Nurse education programs are implementing standardized assessments without evaluating their effectiveness. Graduates of associate degree nursing programs continue to be unsuccessful with licensure examinations, despite standardized testing and stronger admission criteria. This problem is also prevalent for LPN-to-RN education programs due to a lack of research on this group of graduates, who by all accounts should be successful in nursing education based on their work experience and prior nursing education. Findings of this quantitative, non-experimental descriptive correlational study are presented to determine the effectiveness of standardized testing from Assessment Technologies Institute (ATI) as it relates to identifying at-risk LPN-RN students enrolled in two mid-western private colleges and predicting their success on the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN®). The sample consisted of 182 students who took the ATI registered nursing (RN) comprehensive predictor assessment between November 2009 and December 2011. Demographic data and scores on the ATI RN Fundamentals Assessment (composite, nursing process, and thinking scores) were compared with performance on the ATI comprehensive predictor and NCLEX-RN® results. Study findings indicate a statistically significant association between the standardized testing scores and pass rates on the NCLEX-RN® examination, but limited relevance of student characteristics