The effectiveness of the metabolic map in promoting meaningful learning.

Zeynep Gromley,Chinelo Agwuncha,Vinayak K Nahar,Adam Gromley

doi:10.1515/jom-2021-0173

Abstract

Many medical students and practicing physicians view biochemistry, especially its metabolic pathways, as a challenging topic given the depth of material. Medical biochemistry educators aim to help prepare future physicians to apply knowledge of metabolism to disease processes. Research confirms that study tools promote critical thinking and help to connect biochemistry concepts to health and disease processes. To explore whether the Pathways of Human Metabolism Map as a study tool helps to connect basic metabolic pathways to clinical applications. We provided the Pathways of Human Metabolism Map to our first-year osteopathic medical students and conducted a survey to assess their perceptions. Our survey questions aimed to explore the effectiveness of utilizing the metabolic map for connecting the basic metabolic pathways to clinical applications on their studies. Students were surveyed at the end of the course utilizing a Qualtrics survey encompassing Likert scale questions as well as open-ended responses. The results of our comprehensive survey questions revealed the unique perceptions of students. Analysis of our data implicates that study tools like the metabolic map inspire meaningful learning. Our data show that students who utilized the metabolic map in their studies reported that utilizing the map improved their understanding of medical biochemistry. Our research results suggest that providing study aids like the metabolic map encourages students to minimize rote memorization and promotes integration with clinical context. Our results provide a support for study strategies that implement meaningful learning in medical education.

Highlights

Context: Many medical students and practicing physicians view biochemistry, especially its metabolic pathways, as a challenging topic given the depth of material
Many medical students and practicing physicians view basic science information including biochemistry and especially its metabolic pathways as a challenging topic given the depth of material [1]
Many biochemists utilize metabolic maps that have been created by educators, companies, and students to be utilized as study tools [12,13,14,15]

Summary

Introduction

Context: Many medical students and practicing physicians view biochemistry, especially its metabolic pathways, as a challenging topic given the depth of material. The most common of these are the belief that the understanding of biochemistry comes from rote memorization and that the interactions among different metabolic pathways are not always apparent [1, 2] To overcome these obstacles and to graduate competent physicians, educators in the health sciences are developing new teaching tools and methods [3]. To improve understanding of biochemical fundamentals, biochemistry educators have described methods, strategies, and approaches to the teaching of biochemistry, especially of metabolic pathways [4,5,6,7,8,9,10] Overall, these studies concluded that rote memorization of the metabolic pathways are impractical and should be discouraged. Educators from Stanford University and the Association of Biochemistry Educators (ABE) standardized this resource as a learning and assessment tool (the map is available online here: https://metabolicpathways.stanford.edu)

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