Phenomenographic study of basic science understanding-senior medical students' conceptions of fatigue.

Introduction: Helping students learn to apply their newly learned basic science knowledge to clinical situations is a long-standing challenge for medical educators. This study aims to describe how medical students' knowledge of the basic sciences is construed toward the end of their medical curriculum, focusing on how senior medical students explain the physiology of a given scenario. Methods A group of final-year medical students from two universities was investigated.

The anatomy of learning anatomy.

The experience of clinical teachers as well as research results about senior medical students' understanding of basic science concepts has much been debated. To gain a better understanding about how this knowledge-transformation is managed by medical students, this work aims at investigating their ways of setting about learning anatomy. Second-year medical students were interviewed with a focus on their approach to learning and their way of organizing their studies in anatomy.