A Newly Modified Research Design for the Assessment of an In‐class, Student Driven Teaching Activity
Authors: Bentley Danielle C , DeZorzi Christopher Lorry , Richardson Nicholette 
Published: November 2023

The anatomy classroom has become an active space for the scholarship of teaching and learning. Pedagogical researchers who take the initiative to introduce and assess novel instructional modalities hope to improve anatomical instruction. Embedded within the success of such teaching and learning endeavors is an essential reliance on evidence‐based assessments with strong and transparent research designs. This abstract aims to create transparency in the upcoming educational assessment of Movement Guided Learning© (MGL), an in‐class studentdriven activity workbook designed to guide students through various applications of musculoskeletal anatomy including physical movements/stretches, surface palpations/visualizations, and extensions of knowledge through scenarios and case studies. Previous pilot assessments of MGL (one at the community college level (n=29) and one at the undergraduate university level (n=20)) have indicated that MGL promotes student learning of human musculoskeletal anatomy (knowledge improvement of 17.7%, p <0.005), with high levels of student satisfaction (96% of students recommend it). The proposed research project will assess the extended version of the MGL workbook in an undergraduate anatomy classroom. Modifications to the original research design (which was a prospective, observer‐blind, randomized crossover, superiority comparison of the MGL workbook against a traditional Q&A tutorial session) have occurred for improved facilitation of the research as well as segmented assessments of content usefulness. The experimental cohort remains as undergraduate students in the combined fields of Kinesiology and Athletic Therapy. The new research design will use a mini‐MGL workbook that contains a randomly selected subset of activities and applications pertaining to a limited number of musculoskeletal structures. With a blinded course instructor and an unchanged course curriculum, information regarding student performance on examinations from both the 2015 (non‐MGL) and 2016 (MGL) cohorts will be extracted for planned comparisons. The primary research goal is to quantify the effectiveness of MGL as a pedagogical modality for teaching musculoskeletal anatomy by: (1) extracting performance data for examination questions pertaining to mini‐MGL content and comparing performance between the 2015 and the 2016 cohorts and (2) separating individual performance data for the questions that align with mini‐MGL and the questions that do not, and comparing intra‐individual performance outcomes. It is hypothesized that student performance in the 2016 cohort will be improved for examination questions that align with the mini‐MGL workbook only, while performance for misaligned questions will be the same. It is further hypothesized that this improvement in performance will be greater among students who display a preference towards kinesthetic learning opportunities. This descriptive poster presents the newly modified and updated proposed research methods for assessing the outcomes of fully integrating the mini‐MGL workbook into the university undergraduate classroom. This validation is the final step in the multi‐year, multi‐site, series of research resulting in the evidence‐based assessment of the Movement Guided Learning© workbook.