The Use of “Structured Lab Review” to Augment Student Learning and Its’ Impact on Cadaveric Practical Examination Performance

Abstract

In an integrated organ systems‐based preclinical curriculum time for cadaveric dissection and learning from it is becoming a challenge due to reduced curricular hours for delivery of anatomy content. This poses a challenge in which judicial planning is essential in determining how to maximize the available time to benefit student learning. At Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, we faced such a challenge in our Skin and Musculoskeletal (SMS) course during the 2013/2014 academic year that resulted in poorer student exam performance. While students performed satisfactorily on anatomy specific content in the written exam, their performance in the cadaver based practical exam suffered. The cadaver oriented exam required students to identify a tagged structure and answer a primary, secondary, or tertiary question related to the tagged structure. We realized that students were able to identify structures on their cadaver, but not on their fellow classmate's cadavers as they spent very little time in reviewing cadavers other than their own. This resulted in a lack of familiarity, on the part of the students, with regards to structures on the other cadavers. This presented a challenge as to how to improve student recognition of structures across cadavers, as well as it created an opportunity to institute Structured Lab Review sessions within the 2015 SMS course. The Structured Lab Review required students to rotate as a dissection team through all the cadavers, identify several structures from a list provided at each cadaver, answer secondary and tertiary questions about the structures, as well as engage in peer‐to‐peer teaching when group members required help in answering a question(s). We found that students performed significantly better in the 2015 SMS practical exams when compared to the 2014 exams. In addition, students were very satisfied with the Structured Lab Review sessions. This poster will provide the details of planning and executing a Structured Lab Review session as well as provide examples of questions used. Analysis of student performance will be presented. Furthermore, we have since instituted “Structured Lab Review” sessions in the other system‐based modules for academic year 2015/2016.Support or Funding InformationThis study was supported by the Department of Biomedical Sciences.