An extensive review of the literature and a survey of nursing faculties revealed the incompleteness and obsolescence of current texts to meet the needs of the Associate Degree Nursing (ADN) course in current trends. It became evident while researching course content materials for the current trends course that the personal and vocational relationships course required of Licensed Practical Nursing (LPN) students was very similar. Because of this similarity, a core nursing course was proposed which would be equally applicable to ADN or LPN programs. The core course was centered around a common textbook entitled "Historical Perspectives and Current Trends in Nursing," and was offered to students in 12 ADN and 12 LPN programs in public community colleges in Illinois. In order to test the hypothesis that the two levels of community college nursing students would each achieve a satisfactory level of attainment in the core course, 12 unit review tests consisting of 12 items each were administered to 505 ADN students and 469 LPN students. Performance was evaluated through testing for content validity and correlating scores of ADN and LPN students. Mean test scores proved to be essentially equal, verifying the applicability of the course to either program. Data are tabulated and a bibliography is appended. (Author/NHM)