Abstract:

Background When students return to university for continued education, there must be challenges. When becoming a specialized primary care nurse in Sweden, students learn to examine common skin diseases and prescribe pharmaceuticals to treat them. The traditional teaching approach is to first have a medical doctor give one or two lectures and to perhaps, later, have discussions in small groups before an exam.

Summary of work To give students the opportunity to be more active, we reversed the above order of learning methods. The students first had to find facts about skin diseases themselves and write a text to be discussed in a seminar. In this new arrangement, the students had to seek knowledge themselves before meeting the expert in a lecture.

Summary of results All 23 students in the course were asked to voluntarily write about their learning experience in the above reversed order. Their mean age was 38 years and mean time working as a nurse was 7 years. A content analysis was conducted by two researchers. Findings showed that students learn when they: seek knowledge themselves and write it down, practice trusting in their own conclusions and arguing for and against various claims, and are prepared with knowledge of their own when they meet the expert.

Conclusions Students value seeking knowledge on their own, writing it down and discussing among themselves before meeting the expert.

Take-home message Students learn better when they are active. Experiment with letting students engage in their own activity and learning before the experts come to tell their versions of truth.