Nutrition and Dietetic Students Vitamin and Mineral Knowledge and Concurrent Learning and Retention Strategies

Background: The functions, food sources, deficiency symptoms, and toxicity symptoms are important for dietetic professionals to know and apply to community, food service, and clinical settings. Purpose: To assess nutrition and dietetic students’ knowledge of vitamins and minerals and identify students’ strategies for learning and retaining vitamin and mineral information. Methodology: Students from three universities in the western United States were invited to participate in cross-sectional study. Participants completed a brief questionnaire that included multiple choice and short answerquestions to assess their knowledge of a representative list of 8 vitamins and minerals. The questionnaire also included free-response questions about strategies for retention of vitamin/mineral information. Two researchers independently reviewed responses and identified themes. Results: Students’ scores on multiple-choice vitamin/mineral questions suggested that they had difficulty remembering details regarding vitamins and minerals. Three themes were identified as common study strategies for learning vitamin and mineral content: repetition, mnemonic devices, and personal application. Conclusions: These findings suggest that further research assessing the increased use of repetition, mnemonic devices, and especially personal application in dietetics education curriculum are warranted.