The Effect of Metacognition Instruction in Multimedia-based Learning Environments on Nursing Students’ Spiritual Health

Background: One of the main competencies required for enabling Nursing students to provide effective clinical care is spiritual health. The growth and development of nursing students’ spiritual health rely on strengthening their cognitive and metacognitive components. What is more associated with spirituality and spiritual health is students’ metacognition. This study aimed to investigate the effect of metacognition instruction in multimedia-based learning environments on nursing students’ spiritual health.Methods: In this study, a multiple-group pretest, posttest design was used. The population included all the undergraduate students of nursing at Alborz University of Medical Sciences in the academic year 2015-2016. Of these, 60 were selected through a convenience sampling method and randomly assigned to three experimental groups: face-to-face, online, and blended instruction (each including 20 participants). The instruments included an instructional multimedia and a spiritual health questionnaire. For data analyses, a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied.Results: One-way analysis of variance between the experimental groups showed that there were significant differences in terms of the spiritual health variable. Further analyses using Tukey post hoc test revealed that the effect of instruction of metacognitive components on spiritual health in the blended learning environment was higher than face-to-face and online learning environments. In addition, metacognition instruction in face-to-face learning environment had a more positive effect on spiritual health when compared with the online learning environment.Conclusions: Metacognition instruction in blended learning environments was more effective in spiritual health in comparison with face-to-face and online learning environments.