Abstract
As future healthcare professionals, Master of Nursing Specialist (MNS) students will play an important role in nursing and healthcare. MNS education emphasises the cultivation of students’ critical and clinical thinking. Traditional classroom methods often result in students being unable to combine theory with practice and reduce their ability to problem-solve within the scope of clinical or professional services. However, in economically underdeveloped areas with insufficient educational resources, it is difficult to use real clinical situations or virtual reality technology to carry out teaching. To fill this gap, we introduced the digital story teaching method into classroom teaching in Shanxi Province in northern China, which is an economically underdeveloped agricultural province. Real clinical cases were adapted into stories, with integrated digital media elements. A before-and-after study design was adopted to compare the differences between the digital story teaching method group and the traditional teaching method group. The results indicate that students engaged in learning with the digital story teaching method demonstrated more active learning styles, clinical problem-solving skills, and higher academic achievements in classroom performance and examinations. As a continuous and low-cost flexible education method, the digital story teaching method is a teaching mode suitable for popularisation in areas where clinical teaching resources are relatively scarce.