NUR3846 – Critical Approaches to Nursing Theory is a 3-credit upper-division course and the first required course in the RN to BSN program at Daytona State College. It examines the theories and conceptual basis of nursing practice, the historical and current influences that shaped the profession, and the theoretical foundations underpinning nursing as a scientific discipline. Prerequisites are ENC1101, ENC1102, and SPC2608, with DEP2004 as a corequisite, and it is offered fall, spring, and summer.
Its position matters. Students entering an RN to BSN program are already licensed nurses — frequently with years of practice — returning for a baccalaureate. This course is deliberately placed first because it reframes what they already do: moving from nursing as a set of competently performed tasks toward nursing as a discipline with its own knowledge base, theoretical grounding, and professional identity.
Content covers the history of nursing — from Nightingale forward, and the forces that professionalized it; nursing as a discipline — what distinguishes it from medicine; the metaparadigm of nursing — person, environment, health, and nursing; what theory is and does — levels of theory from grand to middle-range to practice theory; grand theorists — Nightingale, Henderson, Orem, Roy, Watson, Leininger, Neuman, Rogers, King, and Peplau among others; middle-range theories — and why they have become more useful in practice; borrowed and shared theories from other disciplines; theory and the nursing process; theory-guided practice — how a conceptual model shapes assessment and intervention; evidence-based practice — and its relationship to theory; nursing research — how theory generates researchable questions; critical analysis and evaluation of theory; professional identity and socialization; current influences — policy, technology, workforce, and health equity; and scholarly writing in nursing, including APA style.
The practical driver in Florida is straightforward: many hospital systems — particularly those pursuing or holding Magnet recognition — prefer or require the BSN for hiring and promotion, and the BSN is the prerequisite for graduate nursing study. Florida's large hospital sector, substantial older-adult population, and continued nursing demand make the degree a practical career investment rather than a credential for its own sake.
Worth knowing before the first week, because it is the most common source of frustration for returning nurses. Associate-degree nursing education is intensively practical: skills, assessment, pharmacology, and the clinical judgment to act. This course is conceptual, and it asks a different kind of question — not what do you do but what is nursing, and on what basis do you claim it as a discipline.
Experienced nurses frequently find that jarring, and a common reaction is that theory is impractical abstraction with no bearing on a real shift. The honest response is that the criticism has some historical force — grand theories are highly abstract and some have been criticized within nursing itself for limited practical utility, which is precisely why middle-range theory developed.
What the course is actually doing is giving you language and structure for what you already know. You already practice a theory of nursing; you have simply never had to articulate it. The value shows up later, in research courses, in leadership roles where you must justify practice changes, and in graduate study — all of which assume this vocabulary.
The most useful strategy in this course, and the thing that distinguishes RN to BSN students from pre-licensure students. You have years of clinical experience to think with, and assignments in this course are almost always better when grounded in it.
Concretely: when asked to apply a theory, apply it to a patient you actually cared for. Orem's self-care deficit theory becomes immediately clear when mapped onto a specific discharge you managed; Watson's caring theory becomes concrete against a specific interaction you remember. Faculty are looking for exactly this, and papers grounded in real practice read completely differently from papers that summarize a textbook.
One caution that matters: de-identify everything. HIPAA applies to coursework, and details that could identify a patient, colleague, or facility should be removed or altered. Programs take this seriously, and it is worth being scrupulous from the first assignment.
The practical warning for returning students. RN to BSN programs are writing-intensive, and many students have not written a scholarly paper in years — sometimes decades. That is the most common cause of difficulty in this course, and it is entirely addressable.
What to do in the first two weeks: get the current APA manual and use it rather than guessing from memory or an old edition; learn CINAHL properly, since finding good sources is half the work and library staff will teach you in twenty minutes; and understand what scholarly writing requires — claims supported by cited evidence, other authors' ideas attributed, and your opinion clearly distinguished from the literature.
Also be careful about plagiarism, which returning students sometimes commit inadvertently by paraphrasing too closely or omitting citations for things that feel like common knowledge. When in doubt, cite. The writing center is free and this is exactly what it is for.
The intellectual content of the course, and the reason "critical approaches" is in the title. Nursing theory has been debated within the discipline for decades: whether grand theories are too abstract to guide practice, whether nursing needs unique theory or should borrow from other sciences, whether the theory-practice gap is a failure of theory or of implementation, and whether the metaparadigm captures the discipline adequately.
A course that presents theory as settled doctrine to be memorized is doing it badly. You are expected to evaluate — using established criteria such as clarity, simplicity, generality, accessibility, and importance — and to be able to say what a theory does well, where it fails, and where it applies. Disagreeing with a theorist, with reasons, is a legitimate and expected outcome.
NUR3846 sits at the entry of Daytona State's RN to BSN sequence, with prerequisites ENC1101, ENC1102, and SPC2608, and DEP2004 (developmental psychology) as a corequisite — a combination that reflects the program's writing and communication expectations as much as its nursing content.
Because this is a 3000-level course, the relevant transfer consideration is the lower-division to upper-division boundary: lower-division nursing coursework from an ADN does not satisfy upper-division BSN requirements, which is the structural reason RN to BSN programs exist as a distinct sequence rather than a set of substitutions. Florida has established articulation pathways for ADN-to-BSN progression; follow your institution's published pathway, and confirm which of your existing general education courses transfer before enrolling, since that is where most of the variability sits.
In Florida's Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit denotes the year in which the course is normally offered — not how well it transfers. 1000- and 2000-level courses transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 transfers without difficulty since both are upper division. The boundary that matters is lower division to upper division: taking a 2000-level course toward a 3000-level requirement is the problematic step. PSAV (0-level) courses do not transfer as college credit at all; that pathway runs through articulation agreements instead.
Separately, SCNS equivalency is keyed to the course number. A program requiring a specific number is satisfied by that number from any participating institution; a different number with similar content still transfers as credit, but the receiving program decides whether it fills that requirement or counts as elective — a curriculum question for an advisor, not a barrier to the credit transferring.
Generated September 2, 2026 · Updated September 2, 2026