The aims of this quasi-experimental research were to compare the students' knowledge of nursing practice before and after providing an instruction pack with videos, compare the knowledge of nursing practice between an experimental and a control group of students, and examine and compare the nursing skills of students who were taught through the use of instructional videos and those taught by conventional lecturing methods. The sample consisted of 104 third year nursing students who registered for the course: Practicum in Nursing Obstetric Clients during the first semester of the academic year 2004. Student identification numbers were used to divide the subjects into two groups, one consisting of the odd numbers and the other of the even ones. The researchers then randomly assigned one group as the control and the other as the experimental group. The instruments used in this study consisted of: 1) those used for the experiments, including five video compact discs, the guidelines for learning materials, pre- and post-tests, and five handbooks consisting of the course content; and 2) assessment instruments (questionnaires) for collecting data about the subjects' demographic characteristics and evaluating their obstetric nursing skills. Data were analysed using frequencies, percentages, independent t-tests and paired t-tests.

The results of the study found that there were statistically significant differences in the obstetric nursing knowledge shown by both the experimental and control groups before and after teaching, using the learning materials for one group and conventional teaching for the other (t = -13.64, p  <  .001; t = -7.110, p < .001, respectively). The mean scores for obstetric nursing knowledge of both groups were higher after undergoing clinical practice. The post test obstetric nursing knowledge of the experimental group was statistically higher than that of the control group (t = 4.56, p < .001). However, there were no statistically significant differences in obstetric nursing skills between the experimental group and control group.

The findings of this study suggest that the learning materials were useful for improving students' knowledge in clinical practice during the intrapartum period. However, the results of the study imply that the use of the video made little impact on developing nursing skills. This might be because the nursing students only watched the video once before they undertook clinical practice. Thus, clinical obstetric nursing skills were not improved by using learning materials. To further improve their clinical nursing skills, nursing students might need to practice obstetric nursing skills in a learning resource centre, as well as being taught using the instructional videos, before undertaking clinical practice courses.