A method for assessing student ability to apply anatomical knowledge within a traditional anatomy laboratory examination.

Fidelity between teaching activities and assessment methods is an important goal of knowledge and performance evaluations in medical education. Ideally, assessment methods provide evidence of learning that reflects the types of knowledge described in the learning objectives of the course. The most reliable assessments involve the same or similar tasks as those used during the instructional components of the course.

A method for rewarding collaborative efforts in preclinical assessments.

Student success in basic medical science courses is typically determined by their individual performance on examinations of various types. Previous research both within and outside medical education has shown that the use of educational assessment activities can increase learning as demonstrated by performance on subsequent examinations, a phenomenon known as the testing effect. Activities primarily designed and used for assessment and evaluation purposes can also be used as teaching opportunities.

COVID-19 modifications to a first year medical human anatomy course: Effects on student performance on summative examinations.

The COVID-19 (COVID) pandemic forced changes in how medical curricula are organized and delivered. In addition to disease mitigation strategies, other curricular modifications were required to maintain educational effectiveness and student and faculty safety. While these changes appear to be successful in their primary goal, their effect on learning and other important educational outcomes is less well understood.

An approach to determining, delivering, and assessing essential course content in a medical human anatomy course.

Learning objectives typically indicate subject matter judged to be important or that represents essential material to be learned during a course. We report here on our efforts to identify essential course content and determine our effectiveness teaching and assessing this content in our preclinical human anatomy course. Using a consensus driven approach, we identified anatomical structures, relationships, and functional concepts judged to represent essential material in our unit on the thorax that students were expected to be familiar with.

Small group learning/assessment sessions: A method using test enhanced learning to increase engagement in a basic medical science neuroanatomy course.

Previous research has shown that test-enhanced learning with structured feedback facilitates durable learning. We describe a small group learning/assessment activity using these approaches intended to increase engagement and engagement with the course material. We divided our class into six groups of seven students each that worked together in the activity.

Anatomy of the physical examination: A small group learning approach for increasing engagement and learning in a medical gross anatomy course.

The ability to perform and interpret the physical examination requires an understanding of human anatomy and how to apply that content in the clinical setting. Previous work has shown that students understand and retain information more effectively when they are actively engaged in the learning process and it is clearly linked to other coursework and their future needs. We developed a series of learning activities, based on the general physical examination, designed to enhance engagement and encourage durable learning of anatomical principles that are important in performing and interpreting the physical examination.

Draft Genome Sequences of 10 Bacteria from the Marine Group.

Here, we report the draft genome sequences of 10 marine bacteria that were isolated, assembled, and annotated by undergraduate students participating in a marine microbial genomics course. Genomic comparisons suggest that 7 of the 10 strains are novel isolates, providing a resource for future marine microbiology investigations.

Invited review: Recommendations for reporting intervention studies on reproductive performance in dairy cattle: Improving design, analysis, and interpretation of research on reproduction.

Abundant evidence from the medical, veterinary, and animal science literature demonstrates that there is substantial room for improvement of the clarity, completeness, and accuracy of reporting of intervention studies. More rigorous reporting guidelines are needed to improve the quality of data available for use in comparisons of outcomes (or meta-analyses) of multiple studies. Because of the diversity of factors that affect reproduction and the complexity of interactions between these, a systematic approach is required to design, conduct, and analyze basic and applied studies of dairy cattle reproduction.

Novel joint cupping clinical maneuver for ultrasonographic detection of knee joint effusions.

Introduction: Knee effusions occur due to traumatic and atraumatic causes. Clinical diagnosis currently relies on several provocative techniques to demonstrate knee joint effusions. Portable bedside ultrasonography (US) is becoming an adjunct to diagnosis of effusions.

Pattern profiling and mapping of the fat body transcriptome in Drosophila melanogaster.

In Drosophila, the fat body is a collective name for the masses and sheets of adipose tissue that are distributed throughout the fly body. Thus far, >386,000 Drosophila expressed sequence tags (ESTs) have been deposited to the GenBank database, including 10,443 derived from fat body in flies (data accessed on October 7, 2004). The objective of this study was to map the transcriptome of the fat body in flies and thus provide genomics and bioinformatics tools for developing a Drosophila model for addressing the genetic complexity of obesity in humans.