Abstract:
This paper addresses some of the challenges faced by rural lecturers teaching human bioscience to pre-registration undergraduate nursing students. Rural nursing programmes attract large numbers of adult entry students who often have not completed Year 12 school study recently, if at all. Consequently they have often missed out on not only high school science curriculum but the higher cognitive skills developed in senior high school years. As a result of recognising the needs of these students an innovative tutoring programme for the first year bioscience subjects was developed to assist the knowledge acquisition of the students by enhancing implicit aspects of learning whilst still providing traditional tutoring methods. Activities were particularly designed to address the language and memory aspects of the factual components of the curriculum in active rather than passive tasks. Some of these tasks were based upon techniques for second language learning. Overall, the students appreciated the programme finding that active tasks assisted them in overcoming the science literacy component of their study better enabling them to progress their problem solving skills.