The goal of nursing education is to cultivate nursing professionals with professional knowledge, skills, and core competencies. Traditional teaching models limit the development of students' initiative and critical thinking skills. The BOPPPS teaching model, as a student-centered teaching method, effectively addresses the limitations of online learning. This meta-analysis aims to explore the differences in teaching effects between online teaching strategies based on the BOPPPS teaching model and traditional teaching methods in undergraduate nursing education in Chinese higher education, with a particular focus on their impact on final exam scores. The research design follows the Cochrane Systematic Review Handbook and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Literature searches cover databases such as PubMed and Web of Science, with a search period from January 2021 to October 2024. Studies were selected according to the PICOs principle, excluding those that could not obtain full text, non-Chinese and English, conference papers, reviews, etc. Two researchers used the Cochrane Bias Risk Assessment Tool to assess the quality of included studies. Statistical analysis was conducted using Review Manager 5.2, with standardized mean difference (MD) and corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CI) used to estimate the effect size. A preliminary search identified 99 articles, with 7 articles ultimately included in the meta-analysis. The results show that online teaching methods using the BOPPPS model have a significant advantage over traditional teaching methods in improving the final exam scores of undergraduate nursing students.