Promoting diversity through exploring and addressing “achievement/opportunity gap” in nursing education: A call to action

Abstract

Promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in nursing education is a contemporary issue. The purpose of this paper is to iterate a call to action for exploring and addressing achievement/opportunity gap in nursing education and propose strategies to address this gap in order to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in educational institutions. Achievement/opportunity gap is an academic performance difference among students based on their socioeconomic status, age, race, ethnicity, and other demographic and sociocultural variables, and can lead to lack of career readiness among students. Four strategies are offered to address the achievement/opportunity gap in nursing education which includes a) explicit exploration of the gap to gather baseline information, b) taking an intersectional approach to examine differences in learning styles, beliefs, values, and learning needs of underrepresented and minority student populations, c) offering extensive co-designed preparatory programs to students who may be more prone to encounter this gap, and d) creating support communities for students to foster their academic performance.