Introduction: Nurses play a crucial role in promoting health and well-being by advocating for, developing, and implementing policies that impact population health at both global and local scales. Achieving sustainable improvements in healthcare requires nurses to possess both professional competence and knowledge of quality improvement methodologies. Quality improvement education, coupled with hands-on proposals, is invaluable for nursing students as it enables them to rhetorically describe evaluation ideas and utilize their experiences as learning tools. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore how nursing students conceptualized perceived educational needs and how these needs were articulated in hypothetical written curriculum proposals produced within a course-based pedagogical writing assignment.

Materials and methods: A qualitative design was employed to explore the student-authored curriculum proposals developed within an educational proposal assignment. The study included six nursing student–authored curriculum proposals. A document analysis inspired by Bowen was conducted.

Results: The analysis revealed four key themes: constructing educational needs through student experience; articulating curriculum proposals using academic conventions; using evaluation-oriented language to establish credibility; making curriculum proposals institutionally legible. The student-authored curriculum proposals developed within an educational proposal assignment offered a diverse array of suggestions for enhancing the nursing education program. Proposed new courses covered topics such as leadership, disaster management, sexuality and sexual health, and knowledge regarding different skin colours.

Conclusions: Engaging in student-authored curriculum proposals developed within an educational proposal assignment during undergraduate nursing education may support the development of discursive and conceptual competencies relevant to engaging with improvement-related language in professional contexts. While patient outcomes were not examined, the findings suggest that such proposals may contribute to students’ preparedness to interpret, critique, and communicate improvement- and evaluation-oriented proposals in institutional settings in their professional roles.