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Fabric Muscles: A New Approach to Learning and Understanding Human Skeletal Muscles
Author(s) -
Mathis Karen M.
Publication year - 2016
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.30.1_supplement.553.9
Subject(s) - dissection (medical) , human anatomy , enthusiasm , anatomy , computer science , psychology , medicine , social psychology
Cat dissection is standard practice in Anatomy & Physiology classes. Use of this methodology to learn the skeletal muscles has several drawbacks: removal of the skin is time consuming and not useful; dissection of muscles is difficult for inexperienced students; muscle orientation is different from that of human's and muscles between species may or may not correlate. To help students better understand location, size and relative placement of human muscles, representations were created out of fabric and attached to human models. A survey of the students indicated that using fabric helped them to better understand the location and interaction between muscles in the arm (54%), leg (58%), face (59%), chest (66%), back (68%) and abdomen (73%), as well as the arrangement of muscles relative to each other (73%) compared to utilizing two dimensional drawings and three dimensional plastic models. In addition, 41/43 students believe this model should continue to be utilized in the future. Student enthusiasm and perceived learning were very high, so this model will continue to be implemented in forthcoming A&P classes.