A group of Monash University researchers have come up with a novel and highly successful way to get tertiary students to engage with both the course content and their peers, revealing that using an escape room scenario led to significant participation, particularly among those students who did not prepare in advance for the class.
Dr Michael Leung and his team, who have just published a study in the journal Advanced Physiology Education, used a flipped learning technique, which involves students engaging with learning content before class, thus allowing in-class time to be dedicated to interactive and practical activities.
"The flipped learning approach allows students to prepare for class through pre-class work, including viewing pre-recorded lectures, reading suggested materials and completing note-taking assignments," Dr Leung said.
"This allows us time within the workshop class during the following week to design creative activities, which consolidate content, develop skills and provide context."
The researchers invited participation from Monash University's second-year physiology unit.
"We developed differently themed workshops to capture the attention of young second year undergraduate students such as board games, escape rooms, fictional catastrophic events, murder mysteries and pop culture references," Dr Leung said.
The researchers studied whether a learning module, about the male reproduction, would be able to engage the entire cohort and encourage them to prepare ahead of class and to attend class.
A total of 418 students (91 per cent of the cohort) attended the non-compulsory workshop, themed around diagnosing the infertility of a fictional medieval king. Pre-and post-workshop surveys assessed engagement, preparedness, and confidence across five physiology topics.
Of the attendees, 333 completed the pre-workshop and 368 completed the post-workshop surveys.
Importantly students reported a high level of engagement (90 per cent) in the post-workshop survey and all students reported an increase in confidence across all topics.
An interesting finding was that the largest gains were observed in the least prepared students.
For example, students with 0 per cent pre-workshop module completion reported confidence increases of 55 to 118 per cent across the topics covered in the workshop, while those fully prepared showed 8 to 19 per cent gains.
Perhaps the inclusive nature of the escape room might benefit students who are less engaged with the preparatory materials.
"The escape room format provided an inclusive environment that encouraged collaboration and active learning, demonstrating its potential as an engaging model for physiology in tertiary education. As educators we should endeavour to think creatively to engage our entire cohort," Dr Leung said.
Read the full paper in Advances in Physiology Education: https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00166.2025
