Bioscience Education and Learning in Nursing

Bioscience forms the cornerstone of contemporary nursing practice, underpinning safe patient care, clinical reasoning and interprofessional collaboration. Core disciplines—anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and microbiology—provide the molecular and systemic frameworks through which nurses understand pathophysiology, interpret clinical signs and explain treatment rationales. Despite its centrality, bioscience remains one of the most challenging domains for nursing students, owing to its abstract concepts, cumulative knowledge demands and perceived distance from hands-on patient care. In response, educators worldwide have developed innovative pedagogical approaches that blend traditional lectures with digital resources, problem-based scenarios and formative assessment tools. These methods aim to foster metacognitive skills, deepen conceptual understanding and bridge theory–practice gaps. By contextualising bioscience within authentic clinical situations and promoting active, self-regulated learning, recent advances seek to enhance student engagement, reduce failure rates and ensure graduates enter the workforce with robust scientific foundations applicable across diverse healthcare settings.

Research from Nature Portfolio

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Bioscience Education and Learning in Nursing publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in bioscience education and learning in nursing across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Self-directed learning: A learner-centred process in which individuals take initiative and responsibility for setting learning goals, selecting strategies and evaluating outcomes.

Metacognition: Awareness and regulation of one’s own learning processes, including planning, monitoring comprehension and reflecting on performance.

Blended learning: An instructional approach combining face-to-face teaching with online digital resources and activities to enrich the learning experience.

Formative assessment: Low-stakes evaluation methods designed to provide ongoing feedback to learners for the purpose of improving understanding and performance.

References

1. Perspectives on self-directed learning in bioscience in nurse education – An integrative review. Nurse Education Today (2024).
2. Integration of anatomy and physiology into nursing practice as perceived by undergraduate students and registered nurses: a scoping review. BMC Nursing (2023).
3. A blended learning teaching strategy strengthens the nursing students’ performance and self-reported learning outcome achievement in an anatomy, physiology and biochemistry course – A quasi-experimental study. Nurse Education in Practice (2021).
4. “Nursing students’ experiences with concept cartoons as an active learning strategy for developing conceptual understanding in anatomy and physiology: A mixed-method study”. Nurse Education in Practice (2022).
5. A team approach to delivery of contextually relevant bioscience: encouraging student connections between tacit knowledge and new content acquisition. BMC Medical Education (2022).