Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots, defined as computer programs designed to simulate human conversation through text or voice, have recently emerged as innovative educational tools in nursing programs (Zhang et al., 2024). These technologies show particular promise in supporting the development of history-taking skills—a fundamental yet challenging component of nursing education (Chen et al., 2023). History-taking is a crucial part of the patient assessment process and high-quality care in nursing. The holistic determination of the patient's care problems depends on accurate history-taking (Potter et al., 2021). A comprehensive history-taking provides data about the patient's current health and lifestyle, including family relationships and cultural factors, and helps establish a communicative and helpful relationship with the patient for making an accurate nursing diagnosis and developing nursing care plans (Butler, 2024). Proficient history-taking is a core competency for nurses, yet this skill is challenging for students to acquire during the early stages of their nursing education (Perry et al., 2024).

The basic principles of history-taking are taught in the first year of the Bachelor of Nursing at the authors' university. The current method of teaching history taking mainly includes two parts: the first part involves nursing educators providing theoretical knowledge and principles of history taking, and then a video example of history taking is watched in class, either face-to-face or through role-playing. This method focused on the components of the history-taking process but did not involve any training in verbal or non-verbal interview skills. In the second part, following classroom learning, students are expected to participate in a history-taking exercise in the clinical setting (Basit & Korkmaz, 2021).

Previous research has identified various instructional approaches for history-taking education, such as traditional classroom lectures, bedside teaching sessions (Liu et al., 2018), peer role-playing (Keifenheim et al., 2017), and the use of standardized patients (Zhao et al., 2022). Research has demonstrated that peer role-playing method is frequently employed among nursing students at the initial stage of learning history-taking. However, interactions between inexperienced peers cannot replace real patient interviews (Keifenheim et al., 2017). Training standardized patients can be costly, but it is often used for practice (Zhao et al., 2022).

Classroom lectures and bedside demonstrations are primarily didactic in nature and offer limited opportunities for active student engagement (Liu et al., 2018). Conversely, clinical practice provides the most effective environment for cultivating history-taking skills (Perry et al., 2024). However, in clinical teaching, factors such as an increasing number of students, an unequal distribution of patients' clinical statements, and a shortage of lecturers can limit the students' history-taking training process (Kestel & Korkmaz, 2023).

On the other hand, first-year students new to clinical practice experience significant stress. Stress also affects students' clinical learning and practice (Gürdil Yilmaz et al., 2022). Conducting an effective history-taking requires a combination of targeted, structured and open-ended questions to gather comprehensive information about the patient's symptoms, experiences, functional status, and life processes (Perry et al., 2024; Potter et al., 2021). When students meet with real patients, they struggle to manage the process of determining which questions to ask and how, as well as forgetting items while taking histories. Therefore, students often experience significant stress and feel overwhelmed when interacting with real patients for the first time in clinical settings (Gürdil Yilmaz et al., 2022). Borowiak et al. (2020) found that the lack of knowledge and skills pointed out among the difficulties in implementing comprehensive history-taking (Borowiak et al., 2020).

According to Thorndike's Law of Exercise, the strength of a stimulus-response connection increases with repetition. In other words, the more frequently a skill is practiced, the stronger and more efficient the learning becomes. This learning theory emphasizes the role of repeated practice in skill acquisition (Derenne, 2022). In line with this theory, the development of history-taking as a practical competency relies on consistent and repeated practice. In this context, this study aimed to investigate the effect of chatbot-supported history-taking practice on the questioning skills and stress levels of first-year nursing students during clinical practice, based on Thorndike's Law of Exercise.