The effectiveness of a self-instructional package for teaching Continuous Flow Analysis in medical laboratory technology

Abstract

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to plan, produce, and determine the effectiveness of a self-instructional package designed to introduce the concept of Continuous Flow Analysis and the use of the Sampler module of the Basic AutoAnalyzer to medical laboratory students. A concomitant purpose of this study was to provide empirical guidelines for developing similar self-instructional units. Procedure. The production of the self-instructional package involved three developmental stages, namely: (1) development of the objectives, (2) selection and production of instructional materials, and (3) formative evaluation. The completed package included an available programmed manual accompanied by three researcher-developed videotapes and a student guide. It was also necessary to develop three evaluation instruments for use in this study. Two were designed to measure learning outcomes and the third was designed to obtain student reactions to the self-instructional strategy. The effectiveness of the self-instructional package was determined by an experiment using a randomized control-group posttest only design which compared three groups of students in terms of cognitive and psychomotor learning outcomes. One group received instruction via the researcher-produced self-instructional package; a second group received instruction by the traditional lecture-laboratory strategy; and the third group did not receive instruction. As an additional measure of effectiveness, an opinion evaluation form was administered to the Self-Instructional group..