An Analysis of the Educational Effects of Studying Basic Life Support.

We set students' learning goal of basic life support (BLS) education at "being able to describe all the steps of BLS in an appropriate order", and objectively analyzed the appropriateness of the learning goal we set and educational effects of lecture contents. Before delivering a lecture, we provided students with an assignment which asked them to "Describe the steps of BLS in an appropriate order", and investigated students' levels of acquiring knowledge on BLS. As the results, the majority of students failed to perform this assignment. Since many students did not understand the process of BLS correctly, the learning goal was considered appropriate in the sense of promoting students' understanding of BLS. We also investigated whether the contents of BLS education was effective to achieve the learning goal. We provided students with the same assignment after the lecture, and the results showed that most students successfully performed the assignment. Furthermore, the time required for students to recall the whole process of BLS was significantly reduced after receiving the lecture, showing that the BLS lecture was effective in improving students' "ability to act to save lives".