Learning Undergraduate Human Anatomy – Relections on Undergraduate Preferences in Singapore: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Anatomy education is a principal subject within international medical and scientific curricula. Nevertheless, in more developed countries and with the paucity of cadavers and anatomy instructors, anatomists have had to supplement the current syllabus with multimedia. using a 5-point Likert scale, we propose investigating the acceptability of learning anatomy through cadaveric prosections and multimedia software as well as considering user preferences. Fifty-six first-year medical students (m1) (average class size 300) and 80 life-science students (LSm) (average class size 130) from the National university of Singapore (NuS) completed the retrospective survey and were included in this pilot study. Both cohorts were taught using cadaveric prosections and multimedia software. Subsequently, student-feedback results on the 2 different teaching pedagogies – prosections alone, and prosections augmented with multimedia – were analysed. All results were tabulated and the P value was calculated using Fisher’s exact test. A P value <0.05 was considered to be statistically significant. m1 students preferred cadaveric prosections to multimedia learning for organs and tissue recognition, as well as for comprehension of general physiology (P ≤0.001). Similarly, LSM students preferred cadaveric prosections to multimedia learning for the same objectives (P ≤0.003). However, all students preferred multimedia learning to cadaveric prosections for self-guided independent study and integration with specific physiology domains (P = 0.001). it appears that students want the best of both approaches in studying the subject.