Teaching and learning for long term retention

Anatomy is generally considered by students to be a subject that is simply learned through assimilation of facts. Unfortunately, this type of strategy both ill‐equips students to form connections between material and ill‐prepares them for more complex learning that is necessary in medical curriculums. It has been shown previously (Regpalla & Easteal, 2013) that retrieval practice improves results in large gross anatomy classes and we are currently assessing the benefit of sleep consolidation in the hard wiring of anatomical information that would provide the basis for more complex learning when required. These results, and others, will be highlighted in a discussion describing teaching and learning techniques used in 2 nd and 3 rd year pre‐med courses in gross anatomy that have optimized up‐to‐date teaching and memory strategies. The presentation will involve the discussion of the following teaching techniques: cognitive load application, spiral syllabus, association (or congruency), constructive alignment, and the use of document cameras. In addition, descriptions of memory acquisition techniques will include: 1) study of lecture material within 3 hours of sleep, 2) sleep acquisition of ‘recent memory’, 3) once‐a‐week labs in both an anatomical dissection room and museum (+1200 specimens), and 4) the use of retrieval practice to enhance long term memory (which has been shown to be more than twice as effective as studying for long term memory: Karpicke & Roediger, 2008). Moving forward, the hope is that the discussion of these teaching and learning techniques, as currently used in gross anatomy courses, will provide educators with examples of how they can be implemented into course curriculum with the aim of improving student learning and long‐term retention. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .