Never Heard That Before! Bioscience Knowledge Retention in Undergraduate Nursing Education

Abstract

Human anatomy and physiology are considered foundational courses in medical, allied health, and nursing disciplines and serve as prerequisites for future theory courses and nursing clinicals. Numerous studies have demonstrated the difficulty for medical and allied health students to acquire, transfer, retain, and apply knowledge from these courses in subsequent years of their programs. However, most knowledge retention studies of anatomy and physiology have been carried out with a focus on medical and allied health students and have rarely been assessed in nursing students. In addition, most studies of interventions in anatomy and physiology have emphasized factors affecting knowledge acquisition in the first year of nursing, and little is known about knowledge retention and application during subsequent years of nursing. This review highlights the current status of knowledge retention in nursing education, identifies potential gaps, and discusses interventional strategies to bridge the gap between the classroom and future theory courses and nursing clinicals.

Content Coverage as a Persistent Exclusionary Practice: Investigating Perspectives of Health Professionals on the Influence of Undergraduate Coursework

“…Further, the majority of nurses asserted during interviews that they did not retain much information from their prerequisite A&P courses. These findings add to existing evidence that retention of A&P knowledge wanes shortly after students finish class ( Narnaware and Neumeier, 2019 ; Narnaware, 2021 ). This raises the question “if professional nurses are unable to recall prerequisite A&P content, why are we teaching it?” While our findings are centralized around A&P, the inability to learn and retain information across all domains of knowledge has been central to conversations regarding reform efforts in undergraduate education for decades.…”

“…A&P content might, therefore, have a higher chance than other prerequisites of being immediately relevant to individuals in their subsequent schooling and careers. Yet, initial reports suggest current A&P course content in nursing programs and core concepts in physiology might not align with the needs of nurses ( Davis, 2010 ; Mahaffey, 2023 ) and might not be well retained in subsequent nursing program coursework ( Narnaware and Neumeier, 2019 ; Narnaware, 2021 ). These prior efforts, which have focused on a subset of A&P concepts or a nursing school population, suggest a need for broader investigations of the relevance of A&P content for working nursing professionals.…”