Ask a nursing faculty member where APA shows up in their program, and you’ll get a short answer: everywhere. Papers, presentations, discussion boards – and almost always with points attached.
Those points add up fast. At Moravian University’s Helen S. Breidegam School of Nursing, students spent one to two hours formatting each paper. Faculty estimated that 10 to 20 percent of their grading time went to formatting corrections instead of feedback on the writing.
Five nursing programs have now run full case studies with PERRLA and written up what happened, in their own words, with the numbers from PERRLA’s usage data. They started in very different places. One required PERRLA from day one. One offered it with no requirements at all. One started halfway through a semester. Here’s what they found.
At Western Washington University, Dr. Katie Wahler and Dr. Christine Espina used to set aside part of class to walk students through citation formatting. In a three-and-a-half-hour hybrid course, it wasn’t a big block, but as Dr. Wahler put it:
“Even if it’s just 15 minutes of one class, that’s a whole thing you may not have to talk about at all.”
With PERRLA in the course, that segment came out of the syllabus entirely. The time went back to the content students came to learn. (It’s the same trade-off we made the case for in Why Professors Shouldn’t Be Teaching APA in Class.)
At Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU), the change showed up in the grading stack. Faculty saw a visible drop in the small formatting errors that used to cost students significant points, which left room to teach flow, argumentation, and graduate-level expectations. Program coordinator Angela Jones put it plainly:
“Really life-changing, and it was life-changing for a lot of the students.”
Western Washington had a rare chance to compare. On a fall annotated bibliography where APA formatting was graded explicitly, faculty could put PERRLA users side by side with the two students who didn’t use it:
Students who used PERRLA: 9.5 out of 10 on APA formatting
Students who didn’t: 7.5 out of 10
It’s one assignment and a small comparison group. But it lines up with what faculty saw elsewhere. At Campbellsville University, after the first large cohort used PERRLA, RN to BSN Program Coordinator Dr. Sarah Smith described the difference as “night and day.” The in-text citations, reference elements, and consistency that used to eat up feedback cycles improved dramatically – and faculty were, in Smith’s words, “happy dancing.”
Moravian didn’t take anyone’s word for it. Students who had activated PERRLA were surveyed before and after. Seventeen responded:
78% would recommend PERRLA to other students
72% felt very or extremely confident submitting their papers
Nearly 1 in 4 saved more than two hours per assignment; most of the rest saved between 30 minutes and two hours
The open-ended answers said even more – students asked for PERRLA to be offered in the first course, so their classmates could start with it sooner. Students at other programs expressed similar sentiments:
“Why haven’t we had this before? This would have been fabulous much earlier.” – Campbellsville University student
“It has been a huge relief to be able to use it.” – Western Washington University student
“I wish I had access to it in my RN program.” – Western Washington University student
The most common concern about any formatting tool is that it becomes a crutch. One SFASU student said it raised it directly: they knew APA mattered and worried they were “circumventing my own learning by using this tool.”
SFASU’s Jones answered with an exercise: format the paper by hand, then compare it with PERRLA’s version. The tool became a way to study APA structure, not skip it.
Campbellsville paired PERRLA with the Concise Guide to APA, and MSN Program Coordinator Dr. Tammy Harris added an orientation assignment on source elements – what makes a book edited, what an issue number is, what belongs in a reference. PERRLA formats what students give it, so students still learn what goes into a reference and why.
What’s left for faculty to grade is the part that matters. At Galveston College, when students did lose points, it was rarely for formatting – it was on judgment calls: when to cite, how often, and how to weave sources into an argument.
And because PERRLA’s formatting engine is rule-based and built by people, not generated by AI, Western Washington’s faculty could recommend it without academic integrity concerns. PERRLA never writes or changes a student’s words.
The software was the same at every school. The rollouts weren’t, and that’s where the case studies have the most to teach.
Require it, and it sticks. Campbellsville required PERRLA for every student, in every paper, from day one, with practice assignments at orientation and before grades were on the line. Over the case-study year, students created 1,279 papers, 3,710 references, and 4,921 citations. Campbellsville is now on a multi-year site license.
Tie it to the assignments. Western Washington never required PERRLA. Instead, Dr. Wahler built it into a scaffolded sequence – an annotated bibliography, then a synthesis paper, then a group podcast – with a tutorial video right in the course. Twenty-two of 24 students activated their accounts.
Start at orientation. SFASU introduced PERRLA at its January orientation, with about 250 RN-BSN and MSN students. Laptops came open, students started accepting their invitations on the spot. SFASU now offers PERRLA as a core tool for its MSN students.
Show students what it can do. Galveston College’s RN-to-BSN program started using PERRLA mid-semester with limited onboarding. When Program Director Karen Bell asked one student how he’d been managing his headings, he said simply, “I just type.” Access isn’t the same as fluency. A short walkthrough of headings and references keeps students from doing by hand what PERRLA can do for them.
Even a light touch works. Moravian offered PERRLA in the middle of a curriculum redesign and a Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) accreditation visit – no mandate, no required training, no points attached. Students still reported the time savings and confidence above and asked for PERRLA earlier.
A free pilot semester. Students go on a roster and get full access to PERRLA Online, the PERRLA Add-In for Microsoft Word, the PERRLA Add-On for Google Docs, and the PERRLA Chrome Extension. The two-page case study is what we ask for in return.
After the pilot: A site license at $9.95 per student per year.
Faculty and staff: Free lifetime access.
Associate degree nursing programs (ADN and ASN): PERRLA free, permanently.
All five nursing case studies are two-page PDFs on our case studies page, each written with the program’s own faculty.
If you’d like to talk about a pilot for your program, it starts with a 15-minute call. Reach out to PERRLA CEO Graysen Pack at [email protected] or visit the PERRLA Partners page.
APA 7 formatting is a common requirement throughout nursing school, from associate-level coursework to doctoral research. Learn how to avoid mistakes with reference lists, heading levels, title pages, and citations, and…
The agency is the author, the department is the publisher, and the retrieval date depends on whether the page keeps changing. Examples for the CDC, NIH, CMS, WHO, and Healthy People 2030.
APA formatting is one of the most persistent challenges in nursing education, and research confirms it doesn’t resolve itself as students advance. Learn why a growing number of nursing programs are choosing PERRLA…
PERRLA formats the whole paper in APA 7, MLA 9, and Turabian 9, from the title page to the last reference.
Try PERRLA free for 7 days
