Medical terminology refers to the specialized language used by healthcare professionals to communicate effectively with one another in clinical practice (Aygun, 2020; Derevianchenko et al., 2018; Links et al., 2019). Many of the terms from this discipline-specific discourse are derived from Greek and Latin words, adding to its complexity (Karaca & Aslan, 2018; Najmiddinova, 2021; Wermuth & Verplaetse, 2019). Research suggests that student nurses frequently struggle to grasp medical terminology and find it challenging to retain the volume of terms they are required to recall, suggesting the need to implement teaching strategies to support the development of this knowledge (Al-Wadi & Alkhabbaz, 2019; Kolodnytska & Vorona, 2019; Tindall, 2018).

Learner-centered pedagogical strategies, which support knowledge transfer via active involvement with the learning process, have been employed by digital education tools to encourage learning via exploration and engagement rather than content consumption (Seidlein et al., 2020). Additionally, dynamic approaches to content delivery and visual technology-based strategies have been utilized effectively for terminology instruction (Aravind & Rajasekaran, 2020; Kingsley & Grabner-Hagen, 2018). Using these as foundations, this research aims to measure the impact of an online teaching intervention on undergraduate, preregistration nursing students’ ability to accurately decode medical terminology. It explores the effects of specific characteristics, namely age, gender, ethnicity and field of nursing being studied.