Study Preferences of Strong and Weak Graduate Students

Abstract

Many students beginning an allied health professional program come directly from their undergraduate academic experience. It is frequently the case that their first experience in a graduate program is a human anatomy course. Instructors frequently report that students struggle more in an anatomy course compared to other courses in a graduate program. One source of these challenges may be their lack of graduate level study skills. In an attempt to lessen student transition struggles with study skills from undergraduate to graduate education, faculty often provide a variety of supports. These may include assessment of learning styles, introduction to new study methods, providing subscriptions to online resources, lecture capture recordings, flash‐cards, anatomy models, cadavers, as well as spaces for group study. Questions arose regarding which of these supports were perceived as most effective for students in a graduate anatomy course.This study examined graduate students' preferred study techniques during two consecutive summer anatomy courses for the years 2014 and 2015 at a small private university's College of Health Sciences. 130 DPT and OTD students completed a voluntary online survey on this topic. The survey asked the students, “Having completed this course, please rank the following study techniques in the order you feel was of the greatest benefit to your personal study method for the exams in the lecture portion of the course.”Of the students that completed the survey, 16 earned an A grade and 14 received a C grade. In this study, the data from the 100 students achieving a B grade was not evaluated. The intent was to determine what the highest and lowest scoring students preferred to use in their written exam preparations. Each student ranked his or her preferred study techniques from 1 (most important) to 7 (least important). These data were evaluated using a Mann‐Whitney U‐test. The results of this survey indicated that the students earning the highest grades significantly (p< .05) utilized cadavers as a method of preparing them for lecture exams compared to the lower scoring students. In addition, the data from the C students identified that their use of a study group was ranked significantly (p <.05) more beneficial when compared to the study preferences of the higher scoring students.These results suggest that the stronger PT and OT students are better able to synthesize the practical hands‐on cadaver experiences and apply them towards the content tested on the written exam. In addition, it appears that the weaker students might be relying too heavily on the use of group study sessions in their preparations for the written exams.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.