Advances in Physiology Education最新文献

Students are assessed by coursework and/or exams, all of which are marked by assessors (markers). Student and marker performances are then subject to end-of-session board of examiner handling and analysis. This occurs annually and is the basis for evaluating students but also the wider learning and teaching efficiency of an academic institution. However, this scrutiny may not be standardized and may differ between institutions and between different study programs and boards of examiners inside the same institution, as well as between sessions. This article aims to suggest a framework for this scrutiny, with provided examples, recommendations, and suggested practices to establish an approach that quantitatively and with statistical methods analyzes performance of both students and markers in a standardized, unified, and transparent manner and that may be employed across subjects and disciplines. The basis for this is accepted and rigorous suitable statistical methods that enable a comparison whereby performance of the student and the associated marking of the student's coursework and examinations in any given course are compared to the same student's performance in comparator courses, which thus establishes whether student or marking performance is comparable to the norm established by and for that student. This measures accuracy, reliability, and consistency of the marking process. The benefit of this is that it identifies strengths and weaknesses in assessment and examination practice, provides evidence to inform decision-making, tracks progress over time, and establishes institutional standards that thereby provide accountability. This establishes good practice in the process of assessment and examination.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Core to their education mission is that colleges and universities scrutinize assessment and examination via boards of examiners, but this scrutiny has no set standard or protocol. This article gives principles and practical recommendations, with examples, for how this scrutiny could or should be carried out, in a manner that establishes accountability and good practice that study programs and boards of examiners in education may utilize, to improve educational practice.

Games and analogies can significantly enrich the learning experience when integrated with traditional expository teaching methods. With this aim, we developed "The Mystery of the Cell Kingdom," an online game designed to enhance understanding of the physiology of thyroid hormones through a medieval analogy. In the game, students are challenged to apply their knowledge of endocrine physiology to solve a series of relevant questions on the topic. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the game as a complementary review tool for a theoretical lesson on thyroid hormones. After an online class, 18 students participated in the game and completed questionnaires before and after the activity. The results showed a 14.9% increase in postgame scores. Feedback revealed that all students enjoyed the experience and provided positive evaluations of both the game and the analogy used. These findings suggest that the online game The Mystery of the Cell Kingdom can facilitate learning about thyroid hormones while offering an engaging, enjoyable, and motivating approach to physiology education.NEW & NOTEWORTHY "The Mystery of the Cell Kingdom" is an online game designed as a revision tool of thyroid hormone endocrine physiology. There is a shortage of knights in the Cell Kingdom and you are called as a historian specialist in the Middle Ages to help solve the mystery. Can you help?

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to reshape education, concerns about the authenticity of student work have escalated, particularly in relation to written assignments influenced by AI-powered tools. This article explores the role of the oral examination as a valuable method for assessing true student understanding and considers its potential for broader use across various educational levels. We propose that oral exams could be effectively integrated into undergraduate courses, providing a means to verify student comprehension in an era of AI-generated content. By adopting oral assessments, educators can enhance academic integrity while fostering essential skills such as critical thinking and effective communication in today's technology-driven world.

Medical schools were incorporating active learning strategies in anatomy teaching to accommodate diverse student bodies. Formative assessment and art as a hands-on learning method had been explored as alternatives to traditional teaching methods. Those methods allowed students to practice and assess their understanding of anatomy as they progress. The present study investigated the effectiveness of "Art in Anatomy" lab sessions in enhancing preclerkship medical students' comprehension of challenging anatomical topics and determining whether differences were related to their year in medical school. This study involved 41 pre-clinical year medical students at California University of Science and Medicine-School of Medicine (CUSM-SOM) who participated in Art in Anatomy sessions. Results showed presession and postsession quiz scores, with differences calculated for first-year and second-year medical students. The study revealed a significant skew in pre- and postsession data, with Year 2 students showing lower mean and smaller range on presession quiz scores. Postsession quiz scores showed higher mean and median scores but reversed on postsession. Both Year 1 and Year 2 students showed improved scores, with 68% experiencing a score increase of 0, 1, 3, or 4 points and 32% experiencing a 2-point increase. Art in Anatomy sessions could effectively support medical students in learning human anatomy during preclerkship years. The method provided formative feedback, aiding immediate recall of anatomical knowledge. Future research should explore different art forms and correlate postsession quiz scores with other students' exam scores, such as end-of-course, National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME), and practical exam scores.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Art in Anatomy sessions could be incorporated in systems-based curricula as a supplementary learning method with the benefit of providing formative feedback to the learners and the educators.

Flipped teaching (FT) is an instructional approach centered around students, displacing traditional lectures from the classroom to make room for active learning. Retrieval practice can enhance content recall. This study investigated the effectiveness of lecture-style teaching (TT), FT, and a combination of retrieval practice with FT (FTR) in a physiology course over four consecutive semesters. Student performance in the FT (92.78 ± 3.93) and FTR (92.98 ± 3.73) methods surpassed that of the TT method (89.28 ± 4.67; P < 0.01), with a notable correlation between science grade point averages and the instructional methods employed (P < 0.01). Analysis of the impact of teaching methods on different segments of the class revealed higher scores for both upper and lower halves in the FT (95.78 ± 1.85 Upper; 89.52 ± 2.79 Lower) and FTR (95.95 ± 1.48 Upper; 89.89 ± 2.68 Lower) compared to the TT group (92.44 ± 1.76 Upper; 85.85 ± 4.43 Lower; P < 0.0001). The gender-based evaluation indicated similar performance between male and female students across the teaching methods tested. Although survey data suggested a preference for TT (100%) over FT (58%) or FTR (85%), student performance contradicted this preference. These findings underscore the effectiveness of FT and FTR methods compared to traditional instructional modalities, with male and female students responding similarly to the teaching approaches. Despite student preferences favoring TT, actual performance indicates that FT and FTR methods enhance student learning outcomes.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Flipped teaching (FT) actively engages students and promotes information retrieval. This study compared FT and traditional teaching (TT) in a graduate physiology course, showing better student outcomes with FT and FT plus retrieval practice (FTR). Gender had no impact: both male and female students performed equally well. Although students preferred TT, they learned better with FT and FTR. This suggests FT and FTR are more effective than traditional lectures.

Heartwheels! STEM Mobile Outreach is a scientist-led collaborative, innovative, and reproducible experiential educational program and mobile lab developed to engage people young and old in the cardiovascular sciences, improve health literacy and awareness of heart-healthy living, and spark curiosity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Applied hands-on interactive activities at Heartwheels! events include heart dissection, cardiovascular physiology, and mock flow loops (science); medical devices (technology); instrumentation and sensors (engineering); and calibration and validation methods and models (math). These modules are complementary to school activities and are particularly successful from an educational standpoint because they are fun, interactive, engaging, voluntary, open-ended, and not graded or assessed and can lead participants and their families to develop STEM-positive identities. Primary learning objectives include a broad understanding of cardiovascular anatomy and physiology, advanced technologies and emerging medical devices, and the benefits of a heart-healthy lifestyle and stimulating interest, building self-confidence, and helping participants envision themselves participating in and making potentially significant contributions to STEM fields. To date, 11,229 attendees of all ages and backgrounds have participated in 55 Heartwheels! events. Excellent programmatic ratings (1-5 scale: 1 = poor, 5 = excellent), including 94.5% of participants self-reporting that it was a fun educational experience and 96.6% reporting that they learned new things, with complimentary verbal and open-ended written feedback, demonstrate the significant impact and value that Heartwheels! and hands-on experiential educational events contribute to diverse, resource-limited, and underserved communities.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Heartwheels! STEM Mobile Outreach is an innovative, portable, scaled-down version of the authors' research laboratory that they take out into the schools and communities to engage and connect with people young and old in the cardiovascular sciences, improve health literacy and awareness of heart-healthy living, and spark curiosity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields through fun, hands-on, experiential educational activities.

Newly acquired information is stabilized into long-term memory through the process of consolidation. Memories are not static; rather, they are constantly updated via reactivation, and this reactivation occurs preferentially during slow-wave sleep (SWS; also referred to as N3 in humans). Here we present a scalable neuroscience research investigation of memory reactivation using low-cost electroencephalogram (EEG) recording hardware and open-source software for students and educators across the K-12 and higher education spectrum. The investigation uses a method called targeted memory reactivation (TMR), whereby auditory cues that were previously associated with learning are represented during sleep, triggering the recall of stored memories and (through this) strengthening these memories. We demonstrated the efficacy of this technique on seven healthy human subjects (19-35 years old, 3 females, four males). The subjects learned to play a spatial memory game on an app where they associated pictures (e.g., a clock) with locations on a grid while they listened to picture-appropriate sounds (e.g., "tic-toc"); next, they took a nap while undergoing EEG recordings. During SWS, half of the sounds from the game were replayed by the app, while half were substituted with nonlearned sounds. Subjects then played the memory game again after waking. Results showed that spatial recall was improved more for cued than uncued memories, demonstrating the benefits of memory replay during sleep and suggesting that one may intervene in this process to boost recall of specific memories. This research investigation takes advantage of the importance of sleep for memory consolidation and demonstrates improved memory performance by cueing sounds during SWS.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Why study when you could just sleep? We demonstrate how students can perform scalable research investigations to manipulate memory processing during sleep. It is a hands-on way to advance students' understanding of sleep-based memory consolidation and the corresponding neural mechanisms using open-source software and do-it-yourself EEG tools.

Although trust is an essential resource in successful social exchanges, the basis of trust in the student-professor relationship in higher education has not been extensively studied. The purpose of the present study was to gain a better understanding of how trust is developed within a medical school learning environment. To that end, we applied a qualitative approach using semistructured interviews. Interview guides were developed based on the leading model of organizational trust, which posits that trustworthiness can be modeled based on three factors of a trustee, namely their perceived ability, benevolence, and integrity. Eleven faculty members and 11 medical students in their core clerkships agreed to participate, providing in-depth viewpoints that were transcribed verbatim for thematic analysis. Faculty interviews sought to develop a model describing how trust develops in the medical school learning environment, and student interviews interrogated how faculty performed within each trust domain to corroborate best practices. The research team applied interpretive-phenomenological analysis to develop consensus around the key themes. Arising from the data, we propose a model showing how faculty demonstrate their ability, benevolence, and integrity to learners as well as features of a learning environment that promote trust, including positive student traits. Finally, we recommend a series of best practices for faculty wishing to develop a trusting learning climate.NEW & NOTEWORTHY This series of interviews with medical students and their faculty were formally analyzed to shed light on how trust is formed in the teacher-learner relationship. We propose best practice points aimed at promoting a powerful and trusting learning environment in medical school.

Learning objectives (LOs) are a pillar of course design and execution and thus a focus of curricular reforms. This study explored the extent to which the creation and usage of LOs might be facilitated by three leading chatbots: ChatGPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google Gemini Advanced. We posed three main questions, as follows: question A: when given course content, can chatbots create LOs that are consistent with five best practices in writing LOs?; question B: when given LOs for a low level of the revised Bloom's taxonomy, can chatbots convert them to a higher level?; and question C: when given LOs, can chatbots create assessment questions that meet six criteria of quality? We explored these questions in the context of four undergraduate courses: Applied Exercise Physiology, Human Anatomy, Human Physiology, and Motor Learning. According to instructor ratings, chatbots had a >70% success rate on most individual criteria for questions A-C. However, chatbots' "difficulties" with a few criteria (e.g., provision of appropriate context for an LO's action, assignment of an appropriate revised Bloom's taxonomy level) meant that, overall, only 38.3% of chatbot outputs fully met all criteria and thus were possibly ready for use with students. Our findings thus underscore the continuing need for instructor oversight of chatbot outputs but also illustrate chatbots' potential to expedite the design and improvement of LOs and LO-related curricular materials such as test question templates (TQTs), which directly align LOs with assessment questions.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Amid much recent interest in the impact of generative artificial intelligence on education, one relatively underexplored issue is the extent to which instructors can use chatbots to work more efficiently. This study determined whether the challenging tasks of writing learning objectives (LOs) and writing LO-linked assessment questions can be delegated to advanced chatbots. The chatbots' outputs were often impressive yet often imperfect and thus can be useful as solid drafts that still require instructor oversight.

An increase in scholarly publishing has been accompanied by a proliferation of potentially illegitimate publishers (PIPs), commonly known as "predatory publishers." These PIPs often engage in fraudulent practices and publish articles that are not subject to the same scrutiny as those published in journals from legitimate publishers (LPs). This places academics at risk, in particular students who utilize journal articles for learning and assignments. This analysis sought to characterize PIPs in physiology, as this has yet to be determined, and identify overlaps in lists of PIPs and LPs used to provide guidance on legitimacy of journals. Searching seven databases (2 of PIPs and 5 of LPs), this analysis identified 67 potentially illegitimate journals (PIJs) that explicitly include "physiology" in their titles, with 8,801 articles being published in them. Of these articles, 39% claimed to be indexed in Google Scholar, and 9% were available on PubMed. This resulted in 17 publications "infiltrating" PubMed and attracting >100 citations in the process. Overlap between lists of PIPs and LPs was present, with eight PIJs occurring in both LP and PIP lists. Two of these journals appeared to be "phishing" journals, and six were genuine infiltrations into established databases, indicating that LP lists cannot be solely relied on as proof a journal is legitimate. This analysis indicates that physiology is not immune to the threat of PIPs and that future work is required by educators to ensure students do not fall prey to their use.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Illegitimate publishing exists in physiology, with 8,801 articles being published in 67 potentially illegitimate journals. Potentially illegitimate journals claim to be indexed by databases such as Google Scholar and Index Copernicus in an attempt to appear legitimate. Lists of legitimate and illegitimate publishers show overlap and some illegitimate articles infiltrate PubMed Central, leading to citations from the wider academic sector.