Abstract
BackgroundThe aim of this review was to identify studies exploring neuroanatomy teaching tools and their impact in learning, as a basis towards the implementation of a neuroanatomy program in the context of a curricular reform in medical education.MethodsComputer-assisted searches were conducted through March 2017 in the PubMed, Web of Science, Medline, Current Contents Connect, KCI and Scielo Citation Index databases. Four sets of keywords were used, combining “neuroanatomy” with “education”, “teaching”, “learning” and “student*”. Studies were reviewed independently by two readers, and data collected were confirmed by a third reader.ResultsOf the 214 studies identified, 29 studies reported data on the impact of using specific neuroanatomy teaching tools. Most of them (83%) were published in the last 8 years and were conducted in the United States of America (65.52%). Regarding the participants, medical students were the most studied sample (37.93%) and the majority of the studies (65.52%) had less than 100 participants. Approximately half of the studies included in this review used digital teaching tools (e.g., 3D computer neuroanatomy models), whereas the remaining used non-digital learning tools (e.g., 3D physical models).ConclusionsOur work highlight the progressive interest in the study of neuroanatomy teaching tools over the last years, as evidenced from the number of publications and highlight the need to consider new tools, coping with technological development in medical education.
Highlights
The aim of this review was to identify studies exploring neuroanatomy teaching tools and their impact in learning, as a basis towards the implementation of a neuroanatomy program in the context of a curricular reform in medical education
The practice of human dissection was prohibited during the Middle Ages due to religious and popular beliefs, it revival at the beginning of fourteenth century and becomes the core basis in medical education and anatomy teaching until the twentieth century
A total of 69 manuscripts were assessed for eligibility. After these manuscripts were read in their entirety, 40 studies were excluded because they were descriptive reports of a teaching method without assessing its effectiveness, they described the development of a new teaching tool, did not focused on the learning of neuroanatomy or were review manuscripts
Summary
The aim of this review was to identify studies exploring neuroanatomy teaching tools and their impact in learning, as a basis towards the implementation of a neuroanatomy program in the context of a curricular reform in medical education. Significant changes have occurred in undergraduate medical education, on one hand because of the introduction of new subjects into curricular programmes as medical scientific knowledge increases and on the other hand because of the move towards skillsbased teaching to face clinical practice [5,6,7,8]. Within this new reality, many preclinical medical curricula started to integrate systems-based units, abandoning the traditional, isolated, discipline-based curricular approaches [9,10,11,12,13,14]. Within the USA contact hours for gross anatomy has fallen from an average of 170 h in 2002 to ~ 150 h in 2012 and in neuroanatomy contact hours decreased from 95 to 83 h from 2002
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