When AI Meets Physiology: Do Nursing Students Really Benefit?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing academia, offering numerous benefits to healthcare systems. Its use in teaching and learning anatomy and physiology in medicine and allied health is well-documented. The role of AI in nursing education, aimed at improving problem-solving, dictation, and documentation, has been evaluated; however, it is particularly lacking in the teaching and learning of anatomy and physiology. Our previous literature review (Mann and Narnaware, 2025) on the implications of AI in nursing education indicated that AI has been shown to improve nursing students’ performance. The present study aims to evaluate the impact of instructor-written questions versus AI-generated questions on the performance of nursing students in four major organ systems. This study included 49 first-year nursing students, with an age range of 18 to 25 years. Multiple-choice questions based on Bloom’s taxonomy were developed using ChatGPT5. Approximately 13-17 multiple-choice questions per organ system were included in the midterm exam covering AI-generated questions, based on Bloom’s taxonomy, were included in the midterm exam covering vascular physiology, blood, defense (Immune system), and respiratory physiology. The percent ratings of individual questions, comparing instructor-written and AI-generated questions for each organ system, are reported as the mean and standard deviation (±SD), with statistical significance set at P < 0.05. The results show that the mean scores for instructor-written questions were comparatively higher than those for AI-generated questions in vascular physiology. In contrast, AI-generated questions slightly improved scores for blood by 2.7% and the immune system by 6.8%. The biggest improvement was in respiratory physiology (13.4%). The students’ ratings were inversely correlated with questions requiring a higher level of comprehension, indicating the lack of critical thinking in nursing students. Overall, AI-generated questions did not significantly improve performance in the concept-based physiological organ systems in the present study This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.