Student Performance in Cardiovascular and Respiratory Physiology is Unaffected by the Number of Courses Tested at Once

Abstract

Physiology has been a foundational course in medical curriculums for several decades. At William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine (WCUCOM), Medical Physiology is taught in both semesters of the first-year curriculum. Cardiovascular and respiratory physiology are the first two major organ systems we teach after the foundational lectures and take up most of the Fall semester. An ongoing debate at our school is whether to test foundational courses by themselves or rather via combined (“integrated”) exams that more closely resemble the board exams. The students prefer the smaller exams, but often end up setting up cycle studying patterns only focusing on one course at a time that ends up hurting them in the second year where combined integrated exams are standard in our curriculum. Going from the 2020-2021 to the 2021-2022 academic year we moved from combined integrated exams where four courses were tested at once to smaller exams where one to two courses were tested at one time. We were also undergoing the second stage of a planned class size increase from 150 students to 175 students, but we previously reported that the first stage of the class size increase did not adversely affect physiology outcomes. In this study, we compared overall student performance on the traditionally challenging cardiovascular and respiratory physiology sections between the Fall 2020 and Fall 2021 student cohorts. In 2020, 156 students completed the Fall semester at WCUCOM. Their average exam score on the cardiovascular questions was 83.11±9.51%, and the average exam score on the respiratory questions was 82.63±11.12%. In 2021, 182 students completed the Fall semester at WCUCOM. Their average exam score on the cardiovascular questions was 84.73±8.06%, and the average exam score on the respiratory questions was 84.42±10.12%. The increase in the mean exam score between cohorts was not statistically different between the two groups (P=0.354, Mann-Whitney rank sum test for cardiovascular questions, and P=0.177, Mann-Whitney rank sum test for respiratory questions). These findings show that student performance on the cardiovascular and respiratory sections of the Medical Physiology course at WCUCOM were similar between the Fall 2020 and Fall 2021 semesters. Our results suggest that the number of courses tested at once may not significantly affect student performance. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.