Effects of Didactic Instruction and Test-Enhanced Learning in a Nursing Review Course

Determining the most effective approach for students' successful academic performance and achievement on the national licensure examination for RNs is important to nursing education and practice.

A quasi-experimental design was used to compare didactic instruction and test-enhanced learning among nursing students divided into two fundamental nursing review courses in their final semester. Students in each course were subdivided into low-, intermediate-, and high-score groups based on their first examination scores. Mixed model of repeated measure and two-way analysis of variance were applied to evaluate students' academic results and both teaching approaches.

Intermediate-scoring students' performances improved more through didactic instruction, whereas low-scoring students' performances improved more through test-enhanced learning.

Each method had differing effects on individual subgroups within the different performance level groups of their classes, which points to the importance of considering both the didactic and test-enhanced learning approaches. [J Nurs Educ. 2017;56(11):683-687.].