Assessing the "Less vs More" Model of Education: Student Perception of Effectiveness in Teaching Practices Among Reformed and Traditional Gross Anatomy Curricula

The most effective teaching practices in anatomy education have been debated over the years as the traditional donor‐based instruction has been contrasted against more modern resources such as prosections, medical imaging, and multimedia resources. While medical schools are struggling to maintain the costly and time‐consuming dissection‐based curriculum, there is an increasing concern that medical students are poorly prepared in anatomy when entering clerkships and residency programs. Since no single teaching tool meets all the educational objectives and individual medical schools rely on a variety of anatomy resources, there is a need to understand the different anatomical teaching strategies utilized across medical schools in order to identify the most efficient teaching paradigm. We surveyed 400 total first and second year medical students from five medical schools in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States: three traditional schools ‐ NYITCOM, SUNY Downstate, Weill Cornell Medical College, and two new medical schools making their inaugural debut – Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine and Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Data showed that most schools require students to spend around six to eight dissection hours weekly in anatomy lab on average. Interestingly, the students from the traditional schools reported spending the most time dissecting (eight to nine hours) and the highest anatomy score. Surprisingly, almost 60 percent of these students preferred to spend the same amount of time dissecting. On the other hand, the students from the inaugural schools reported the least amount of time dissecting (two to three hours) and the lowest anatomy grades but almost 74 percent of these students preferred to spend more time dissecting. The various resources reported by the students included Anki, Grant's, Netter's, 3D Anatomy App, Virtual Reality Lab, prosections and lectures. Our findings suggest that the traditional dissection‐based curriculum plays a critical role in learning and could be the standard from which an integrated customized anatomical curriculum with modern tools and technologies may be the most successful teaching tool. Our work builds on previous research to analyze and evaluate the most effective anatomy teaching strategies utilized across medical schools in the country. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .