Abstract
BackgroundNursing students struggle with anatomy and physiology course because of the complicated terminology and the difficulty in handling large amounts of information. New, innovative instructional strategies must be integrated into nursing education to improve nursing students’ performance in this challenging bioscience course. The aim of this study was to determine the impact of an innovative teaching strategy, the flipped classroom, on the performance and satisfaction of Omani nursing students in an anatomy and physiology course.MethodsA quasi-experimental design was used with two classes of 112 first-year nursing students at the College of Nursing, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. Online videos and active-learning activities about the respiratory system were developed and implemented in an anatomy and physiology course with 53 first-semester nursing students. The control group consisted of a previous cohort of 59 students enrolled in the same course but taught with a traditional lecture approach. The impact of the flipped classroom strategy was measured by students’ performance on the final examination and students’ self-reported satisfaction. Wilcoxon signed-rank and Mann-Whitney U tests were used to compare students’ academic performance.ResultsOur results showed that the performance of the flipped classroom group was better than that of the traditional lecture group. The mean scores of students instructed with the flipped classroom method on the respiratory system items in the final examination were significantly higher than those of the control group, U = 1089.00, z = − 2.789, p < .005. Moreover, the results of a survey showed that nursing students were satisfied with the flipped classroom method. Overall, 68 to 78% of students agreed or strongly agreed that the flipped classroom method improved their learning and increased their interest in the course.ConclusionCompared with the didactic lecture format, flipped classroom strategy improved Omani nursing students’ performance in and satisfaction with an anatomy and physiology course. These results show that the flipped classroom is an important teaching strategy in nursing education.
Highlights
Nursing students struggle with anatomy and physiology course because of the complicated terminology and the difficulty in handling large amounts of information
Whereas students in the experimental group (EG) were exposed to a flipped classroom method where they had to watch recorded videos of the respiratory system at home before coming to class and class time was used for small work-group activities
Participants Fifty-three students were enrolled in the A&P I course in the Spring of 2018 and were included in the EG
Summary
Nursing students struggle with anatomy and physiology course because of the complicated terminology and the difficulty in handling large amounts of information. Innovative instructional strategies must be integrated into nursing education to improve nursing students’ performance in this challenging bioscience course. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, researchers found a huge gap between nursing education and nursing practice, leading to calls for a fundamental transformation of nursing education [1, 2]. This call encouraged nursing teachers to plan learning experiences that will better prepare graduate nurses to practice in a rapidly changing health care environment. Studies have shown that many nursing students struggle to understand and remember A&P knowledge and have difficulty applying this content in clinical practice [6, 7]. Nursing students perform poorly in this basic course, despite claiming to be very interested in the subject, and despite the efforts of nursing educators to engage them [5, 8]
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