Analysis of Undergraduate Retention Outcomes: What do Students Actually Remember?

Abstract

As a basic science, anatomy has commonly drawn criticism as a subject material that can be notoriously difficult for undergraduates to learn. Some common reasons for this scrutiny could be due to students’ perception of anatomy as a course that relies heavily on abstract, rote memorization [1]. Learning through abstract memorization with high intrinsic cognitive load often produces poor retention, compared to more elaborative and meaningful encoding [2]. In this study, student’s long‐term retention of practical material from a standard 4‐credit undergraduate human anatomy course was reassessed 5‐month past end of term. This data was compared to their continuous practical assessment throughout the semester. Students who had successfully completed this course in the past semester were invited to take part in this study. Informed consent was obtained and participating students attended a single, one hour post‐assessment during their regularly scheduled lab time. This post‐assessment evaluated their retention of lab course material using free recall type questions. Anonymized data were collected and analyzed using Excel. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at University of Minnesota.Out of the 156 enrolled students, 94 eligible students participated, yielding a 60% response rate. When comparing post‐assessment results to the practical lab exams, a significant linear moderate positive relationship between the two of them was observed (correlation coefficient=.5971, p<.00001). This suggests that practical lab exams are moderately accurate at predicting students’ performance on the post‐assessment. There is no correlation between student performance and memory retention, as indicated by the linear relationship between the data sets. When comparing written to practical exams, written exam scores stayed relatively constant while students’ practical exam scores were found to have steadily and significantly increased across the semester (p<.00001). This suggests that there was significant development of spatial reasoning skills from the lab material itself. More data, using the same metric, will be collected in the coming years from future cohorts to validate the findings of this study.Support or Funding InformationNone