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Active learning: hands‐on activities add pizzazz to lecture‐based anatomy courses (721.10)
Author(s) -
Bee Mary,
Farrugia Jamie,
Ottenbreit Mark
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.28.1_supplement.721.10
Subject(s) - class (philosophy) , craft , likert scale , variety (cybernetics) , medical education , psychology , anatomy , mathematics education , medicine , computer science , visual arts , artificial intelligence , art , developmental psychology
Educating students in the field of anatomy has been a challenge for decades. Bringing a “dead” science to “life” has been problematic for even the greatest of educators. We have examined several different group activities and approaches to teaching anatomy that incorporated a variety of teaching activities designed to keep the learning process engaging, stimulating, and self‐motivating. Developing novel approaches for the group activities in a lecture based class is essential for student engagement. Group activities that we have successfully implemented include the incorporation of clinically relevant video clips, which students assess and discuss as a group, construction of organs out of modeling clay and/or other craft supplies, using fabric muscles made of felt to attach to a skeleton which helped reinforce their understanding of muscle attachments, using yarn to depict the passageway of nerves in the brachial plexus and spinal cord tracts, and other approaches. The level of student satisfaction increased 23% and the majority of students felt that these activities enhanced their learning with an average of 4.74 out of 5 on the Likert scale. Moreover, grades increased 12% compared to another section of the same class where these techniques were not employed. Engaging teams of students is of great importance for understanding difficult concepts, retention of knowledge in anatomical sciences and student satisfaction.