Effectiveness of a nursing board games in psychiatric nursing course for undergraduate nursing students: An experimental design

Aim: To examine the effectiveness of a psychiatric nursing board game in an undergraduate psychiatric nursing course.Background: Didactic teaching fails to assist students in deepening their understanding of abstract concepts in psychiatric nursing. The game-based learning of professional courses can address the demands of digital-age students, which may improve their learning outcomes.Design: A parallel two-arm experimental design was adopted in a nursing college in southern Taiwan. Methods: The participants were fourth-year students enroled in a college nursing programme in southern Taiwan. Simple random sampling was used to divide the class into intervention and control groups. The former participated in an eight-week game-based intervention course, while the latter continued to receive traditional instruction. In addition to collecting the students' demographic data, three structural questionnaires were developed to examine the variation in students' nursing knowledge and attitudes toward psychiatric nursing, as well as their learning satisfaction before and after the intervention.Results: There were a total of 106 participants, with 53 in each group. After the intervention, the two groups were significantly different in terms of their psychiatric nursing knowledge, attitudes and self-reported learning satisfaction. The intervention group's scores were significantly higher than those of the control group across all three dimensions. This suggests the positive effects of the board game intervention on students' learning outcomes.Conclusion: The research outcome can be applied in formative and undergraduate nursing education in teaching psychiatric nursing globally. The game-based learning materials developed can be used to train psychiatric nursing teachers. Future studies should recruit a larger sample and increase the follow-up time for assessing students' learning outcomes, as well as examine the similarities and differences in the learning outcomes of students from different educational systems.