Application of active teaching methodologies in the human nutrition and dietetics degree

Resumen

During the 4th school year of the Human Nutrition and Dietetics degree, students course a subject named Dietotherapy. The aim of this subject is to teach students how to design therapeutic diets for patients with specific health alterations, and thus it represents a great opportunity to put in practice the knowledge acquired in other subjects/school years. To put in practice the acquired theoretical knowledge, during the practical work (classroom-problems) of this subject, the students have to design diets for patients suffering from type 2 diabetes and kidney failure. However, using traditional teaching methodologies, students tend to lose interest quickly. Consequently, the marks tend to be low, as it happens with the adherence of the students to the scheduled teaching program. In order to shift this situation, we wanted to know whether the usage of active teaching methodologies could constitute a useful tool.To do so, a hypothetical situation was suggested to the students: they were working in their own nutrition consultation and they had to design diets for two of their patients.The first one was an elder woman with type 2 diabetes who had difficulties to regularly attend to the consultation. Taking into account the features of the dietetic treatment for her condition and the necessity of the patient to be self-sufficient to manage her diet (difficulties to attend to the consultation), a project based learning activity was suggested. The students were encouraged to use the food exchange system to design the diets for this patient. The reasons for that were that this method to design diets is not enough studied during the Human Nutrition and Dietetics degree, and that in this case, was the best choice.The second patient was an elder man suffering from kidney failure. Traditionally, the session devoted to design the diets for this patient included an introduction explaining both the features of the disease, as well as those of the dietetic treatment. Consequently, the students tend to run out of time and they end up finishing the diets on their own, which had a negative impact in the quality of the designed diets and thus in the obtained marks. In order to gain time, a flipped classroom was suggested. The students had to watch on their own (at home) different graphic material (videos) in which information regarding kidney failure and diets for this kind of patients was given. Then, at the beginning of the session, a survey was carried out (using Socrative) to ensure that the students understood the given material and to discuss any possible doubts. Once the survey was concluded and all the doubts clarified, the students had significantly more time to work on the diets for the aforementioned patient.Despite the fact that this was the first time that these teaching methodologies were introduced in this subject, the obtained results (significantly improved compared to the previous year), as well as the feedback received from the students, showed that their usage effectively enhanced the output of the practices. Indeed, the management of the available time to do the practical work was better and consequently the students had more time to finish their work in the classroom. For the near future, we have the commitment to keep using these methods, as well as introducing new ones.