Al-Hikmah University Journal

Teaching is constantly being modernized to suit the ever changing needs of diverse learning experiences of students. Continuous evaluation of teaching methods is therefore a routine. The study assessed the effects of modified lecture and case-based teaching (CBT) methods on student nurses’ cognitive achievement in Nursing Schools. Adopting a quasi-experimental two-group research design, a combination of stratified and simple probability sampling techniques was used to select two schools. Students were assigned to control and experimental groups. A set of multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank spaces, short-answer test items was used to measure the cognitive performance of the 102 respondents, before and after lecture and case-based teachings on “postpartum haemorrhage” in Maternal and Child Health Nursing course. The data collected at both phases were analyzed descriptively and inferentially using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 23.0. Results revealed that in the two schools, students were predominantly females (89.2%). The scholastic achievement showed that mean score for lecture method in posttest compared to pretest was good > 50%. In lecture, there was also an improved performance in the post-test with 56.7% scoring > 50. For CBT, 80.0% of the students in School I had poor score (< 49%) in the pre-test while only 33.3% improved posttest. In comparison, the mean score of students for lecture was higher than that of case based teaching. This indicates that the post test scores for each of the teaching methods increased; although scores for the lecture method improved more significantly than that of the CBT. It is concluded that mean scores for modified lecture method for both experimental and control groups were higher than those of case based teaching groups in both schools, indicating that cognitive achievement in lecture was higher. The post test scores for lecture improved more significantly, indicating that effect of lecture on cognitive achievement of student nurses was better. No statistically significant differences were however found between them. It was therefore recommended that student nurses should be exposed to case based teaching in the nursing curriculum as it appears a less used approach, accounting for its less improved scores post-test