External constraints that led to physiology lab improvements.

The modifications were in response to changing constraints, including time, money, space, student background, and my knowledge and comfort. The lab went from emphasizing experiments with the attendant troubleshooting and data analysis skills to a lab focused more on giving prehealth professional students the motivation to learn physiology problem-solving skills by providing real cases. In the lab, students watched and listened to a random student try to use these problem-solving skills to solve the problem.

Making Sense of Sensitivity: Using Candy and Anthropometric Data to Visually and Manipulatively Illustrate Sensitivity, Positive Predictive Value, and Related Terms.

The classic concepts of sensitivity and specificity are commonly taught by definition only, often with discipline-specific jargon and without any tangible relation to their use in the real world. Yet, the COVID pandemic and the spotlight on diagnostic screening tests have brought a need for science and health care students, health professionals, and the general public to have improved understanding of sensitivity and specificity and how they connect to further interpretive values. These understandings are critical for correct communications and explanations to those outside the sciences.

Kinesthetic and visual scaffolding for understanding oxygen delivery and reading hemoglobin oxygen curves.

I describe a kinesthetic activity about oxygen handling by hemoglobin with two specific goals: ) to help students gain a better understanding of how hemoglobin properties affect oxygen delivery and ) to improve the ability of the students to actually read the hemoglobin oxygen-binding curve. The activity makes understanding oxygen delivery more intuitive, provides a kinesthetic analog to delivery of oxygen, and provides data to plot for the hemoglobin-oxygen curve.