Development and Evaluation for Active Learning Instructional Design of Epidemiology in Nursing Informatics Field

Nursing education classes are classifiable into three types: lectures, classroom practice, and clinical practice. In this study, we implemented a class that incorporated elements of active learning, including clickers, minutes papers, quizzes, and group work and presentation, in the subject of "epidemiology", which is often positioned in the field of nursing informatics and which is usually taught in conventional knowledge-transmission style lectures, to help students understand knowledge and achieve seven class goals. Results revealed that the average scores of the class achievement (five levels of evaluation) were 3.6-3.9, which was good overall. The highest average score of the evaluation of teaching materials by students (five levels of evaluation) was 4.6 for quizzes, followed by 4.2 for announcement of test statistics, 4.1 for clickers, and 4.0 for news presentation related to epidemiology. We regard these as useful tools for students to increase their motivation. One problem with the class was that it took time to organize the class: creation of tests, class preparation and marking, such as things to be returned and distribution of clickers, and writing comments on small papers.