When reviewing HealthCenter21 as a potential resource for their courses, health science teachers have a lot to consider.
Does it align with your curriculum standards? Will it help prepare students for certifications? And most importantly - What will the impact be on your students’ learning experience?
Even if HealthCenter21 meets your standards and prepares students for certifications, a disconnect for your students can be a major problem.
In this article, you’ll discover what HealthCenter21 looks like from the students’ perspective and how the system can improve your students’ understanding and long-term information retention.
You’ll also learn how to implement the curriculum to give your students an interesting and effective learning experience.
Before getting into the details of what students can access, let’s review how the curriculum is organized in the HealthCenter21 system.
How Is the HealthCenter21 Curriculum Organized?
The HealthCenter21 curriculum is made up of learning modules that each focus on an overarching topic such as Client Status, Communications, or Infection Control.
These modules follow our unique learning plan called the Four Phases.
This learning plan acts as a framework to help you maximize student understanding, engagement, and information retention.
The four phases of the HealthCenter21 curriculum are:
- Explore: Teacher-led activities to hook students’ interest
- Learn & Practice: Student-directed eLearning within the system to learn new concepts and skills
- Reflect: Teacher-led activities to review and discuss key ideas
- Reinforce: Student-directed projects to enhance understanding of concepts and skills
These four phases are our way of presenting learning content in a structure any teacher can follow to help students retain key information for the long term.
With that, let’s dive more specifically into what your students complete when logged into HealthCenter21.
What Do Students Have Access to Within a HealthCenter21 Module?
When logged into the AES system, your students will access the independent learning materials found in the Learn & Practice phase.
Materials in the other three learning phases are only available to the teacher and will need to be provided to students on a case-by-case basis. Here's an example of what you see versus what your students can see for the Cultural, Social, and Ethnic Diversity module:
When your students sign into HealthCenter21, they’ll see the modules you’ve assigned to them, along with the associated due dates and progress.
Within each module, students will complete eLearning lessons and a variety of assessments.
In the sections below, you’ll learn more about these pieces and the benefits they provide to your students.
How Self-Directed eLearning Lessons Build Student Engagement and Understanding
HealthCenter21 helps teachers create dynamic, blended learning experiences that keep students engaged while maximizing student understanding.
The eLearning lessons help accomplish this in three ways:
- Following multiple teaching theories to organize lessons
- Presenting lesson information in an engaging way
- Reinforcing information with guided notes
These strategies come together and ultimately lead to better long-term retention of information throughout your students’ schooling and future careers.
Following Multiple Teaching Theories to Organize Lesson Information
Within a module, the HealthCenter21 curriculum is organized into units and lessons. The material is presented in this way according to two learning theories - chunking and scaffolding.
Chunking involves breaking down a large amount of information into smaller “chunks” of related information.
We use chunking to break modules down into units and individual lessons to make the content more manageable for your students, as shown here for the Health Career Exploration module:
Organizing modules via chunking results in better comprehension and makes it easier for students to remember what they learn.
Scaffolding is a method of instruction that incrementally builds on the learning that has happened previously.
Here’s how scaffolding works in the Client Status module of HealthCenter21:
In Unit 1, students learn about vital signs and body measurements and their importance to overall health.
In the following units, students learn more in-depth about the specific vital signs of body temperature, pulse, respiration, and blood pressure.
At the end of the module, Unit 6 provides a game on reading analog medical devices that uses repetition to help students apply and practice what they’ve learned.
We use the scaffolding method to give students as much exposure to the information as possible and are required to recall what they have learned multiple times.
This exposure and recall results in better long-term information retention, which is critical as your students enter the healthcare field.
Presenting Information in an Engaging, Relatable Way
Finding ways to make your health science lessons relevant to students can be challenging, especially when it comes to topics CTE students typically consider boring.
When developing eLearning lessons, we want to ensure the material is accurate, engaging, age-appropriate, and relevant to your students.
That’s why we focus on making the content relatable to something real in your students’ lives. For example, when we expanded the Diseases and Disorders module, we chose asthma and diabetes because even younger students likely know someone who has one of those diseases.
Additionally, the lessons depict diverse individuals to allow students to see themselves portrayed in healthcare job roles.
For the most difficult topics for students to relate to, we incorporate real-world scenarios, simulations, interactive activities, and learning games within the modules.
These additional interactions help students make better connections with the material presented.
By presenting the eLearning materials in this way, students stay engaged while forming real-life connections. This combination helps improve understanding and cements the information in your students’ long-term memory.
Learn More: 5 Ways HealthCenter21 Boosts Student Engagement
Reinforcing Information with Guided Notes
Even with engaging, relatable content at their fingertips, students need to interact with and apply what they are learning in various ways.
That’s why HealthCenter21 includes student worksheets for each lesson.
As students work through the eLearning lessons, they will follow along and answer questions highlighting each lesson’s most important concepts.
These worksheets are available as printable PDFs or in an electronic format, depending on your students’ needs and what works best for your situation.
Answering the worksheet questions make students stop and pay attention to what they are reading and hearing. This requires them to process the information and then relay it to answer the associated worksheet questions.
After students have completed the worksheets, they can go back and use them as a study guide to further cement the information and prepare for their assessments.
How Assessments in HealthCenter21 Reinforce and Solidify Learning
Within learning modules, students will also complete multiple types of assessments:
- In-lesson questions
- Formative unit quizzes
- Summative module tests
Each type of assessment serves a specific purpose, all tied to the end goal of increasing student understanding and long-term retention of information.
In-Lesson Questions
Within the eLearning lessons, your students will encounter non-graded questions that check for understanding.
Answering these questions requires students to recall and apply what they have just learned. This helps to further cement their understanding of the concepts discussed.
In addition, these questions allow students to gauge their understanding of the topic by acting as checkpoints throughout the lesson.
If a student struggles to answer a question, they know they should review that part of the lesson before proceeding further.
Formative Unit Quizzes
After students complete all of the eLearning lessons within a unit, they are assessed with a unit quiz.
A unit quiz is a formative assessment that acts as a knowledge check of how well students comprehend the unit’s material.
Because the quiz is a formative assessment, teachers can adjust their class settings to allow multiple attempts on unit quizzes.
So, if a student doesn’t do well on a quiz, they know that they should go back and review the lesson content over again.
Overall, completing the unit quizzes help students gauge how well they understand the material. Then they can go back and review lessons as needed to prepare for the module test.
Summative Module Tests
After completing all of the units in a module, students are assessed with a module test.
The module test is the summative assessment that measures how well a student masters the module’s content.
As a summative assessment, the module test includes questions from each unit to ensure full comprehension of the material.
After a student completes the lessons, units, quizzes, and module test, you’ll be able to track their learning development throughout the semester from your AES teacher dashboard.
How to Implement HealthCenter21 to Improve Your Students' Learning Experience
Now that you know what your students complete within HealthCenter21 and how it can help them learn, you’re likely wondering the best way to use the system in your classes.
The key to success is remembering the Learn & Practice phase is only one piece of the four-phase structure of the curriculum.
The information gained from the Learn & Practice phase is made stronger when partnered with the three other phases - Explore, Reflect, and Reinforce.
In those phases you’ll find class activities, skills demonstrations, teacher presentations, group projects, and more to support your students’ learning.
For example, in the Behavioral Health module, students learn the bulk of the information from the Learn & Practice eLearning lessons.
However, when you incorporate the other phases from the module, students will:
- Create a 12-step program flyer
- Create a suicide prevention information flyer
- Answer reflection questions
- Research and identify local behavioral health services
- Research a current event related to behavioral health
While it may feel overwhelming to figure out the best way to use the four-phase curriculum in your health science courses, you don’t have to do it alone.
Thousands of teachers have been in your shoes, and they have each found the best way to use the system with their unique students.
To help you get started, we’ve compiled their collective experience into a singular resource to help you navigate the ins and outs of HealthCenter21: The AES Teacher’s Guide.
This guide provides an overview of the teaching materials within the AES curriculum, how to implement the four-phase structure, and the best ways to use the resources with your students. All in all, it contains everything you need to make sure your class is successful.
