101 - Impact of Content Reinforcement of Muscular and Skeletal Systems on Knowledge Retention in Nursing Students

Poster Board Number: 101
There are separate poster presentation times for odd and even posters.
Odd poster #s – first hour
Even poster #s – second hour

Abstract Body : The human anatomy is regarded as a cornerstone of health care disciplines and is a pre-requisite for subsequent years of medical, allied health and nursing theory courses and clinical (Young et al., 2016). Numerous studies have expressed concern over students' ability to acquire anatomical knowledge in the first year and successfully transfer, retain, and apply it throughout their program (Doomernik et al., 2017; Narnaware and Neumeier, 2020; Narnaware, Y. 2021). To overcome the gap between first-year theory to senior years of theory and clinical, several robust interventional strategies have been employed in medicine and allied health disciplines (Manyama et al., 2016). However, these interventions are lacking in nursing education. We have previously shown that nursing students lose anatomical knowledge by approximately 30.0% over three years (Narnaware, Y. 2022a). To improve the acquisition and retention of anatomical knowledge, the present study aims to evaluate an interventional strategy that includes the repeated assessment of the muscular and skeletal systems over eight weeks that will help improve knowledge retention. Nursing students were quizzed on the muscular and skeletal systems using the online quizzing system Kahoot. Each Kahoot quiz included 7-9 knowledge and comprehension level multiple-choice questions, and new sets of questions were used for each week’s Kahoot quiz. Data were statistically analyzed using SPSS II, and means were compared using 2-sample t-tests. The scores are described as the mean and standard deviation (SD) and are presented in table 1 and figure 1. Statistical significance was set at P < 0.05 for all tests. Compared to week 1, repeating knowledge of the muscular system yielded a slight decrease in knowledge retention in week 2 (-3.4%) and week 8 (-3.3%) but was significantly lower in week 4 (-20.9%). Whereas retention was comparatively higher at week 3 (+6.2%) and week 6 (+5.3%) compared to week 1 (Table 1 and Fig.1). In comparison to the muscular system, repeating anatomical knowledge of the skeletal system over eight weeks resulted in a significant increase in knowledge retention at week 2 (+20.0%) and week 3 (+19.4%) and week 6 (+28.5%) compared to week 1. Whereas anatomical knowledge was slightly lower at week 4 (-4.3%) but slightly higher at week 8 (+1.4%) compared to week 1 (Table 1 and Fig.1). The higher retention in weeks 3 and 6 for the muscular system and weeks 2, 3 and 6 for the skeletal system may be, in part due, that students were reading these organ systems for the midterm exams. Although organ system-specific changes in knowledge retention were found, the study results show that nursing students were able to retain the knowledge of the muscular and skeletal systems over eight weeks and had better knowledge retention of the skeletal system than the muscular system after eight weeks of repeated knowledge assessment. No comparable data on content reinforcement of these systems are available in allied health and nursing students. The results of this study are consistent with those of medical students in neuroanatomy (Anderson et al., 2016) and nursing students in the cardiovascular physiology content reinforcement study reported earlier (Narnaware, Y. 2022b). Therefore, content reinforcement should be used as one of the interventional strategies to improve knowledge retention in nursing students. Further research should be conducted to evaluate effective ways to maintain increased retention over extended periods.