Effects of Dissection Experience on Medical Student Exam Performance in Gross Anatomy
Authors: Dunham Stacey M. , Husmann Polly R. 
Published: June 2021

As medical school curriculums evolve, contact hours with students in many gross anatomy laboratories decrease. One common solution is an alternating dissection format in which students are assigned to two teams (A and B) and the teams alternate dissection class sessions. Alternating dissection is often paired with a peer teaching component to ensure students have exposure to all dissection session. For example, Team A teaches Team B about the dissection completed by the Team A, then Team B teaches Team A in the next lab. The goals of a peer teaching, alternating dissection laboratory format are to reduce contact hours while continuing hands‐on dissection experience and maintaining student learning of all course content. The purpose of this study was to determine if the act of dissection had an impact on a student's ability to correctly identify structures on human gross anatomy assessments. This study was conducted in a year‐long human gross anatomy course with 36 first‐year medical students and focused on the laboratory component of the course. The anatomy laboratory used an alternating dissection format with a dedicated peer teaching process. The course was divided into 6 blocks and each block had approximately 8 dissection sessions. Each team (A and B) actively dissected in half of the sessions in each block. Blocks culminated with an exam that required students to rotate through 40 stations, answering approximately 100 questions focused primarily on structure identification. These laboratory exams were retained by the instructor. For this study, all of the questions on the exams were classified based on the laboratory session in which the structure was dissected. Each student's answers for all questions on all exams were then identified as dissected or not dissected by the student and answered correctly or incorrectly on the exam. The data was analyzed using a Generalized Estimating Equation model (GEE). A GEE was selected because of the binary nature of the data and to account for the correlation of the data due to repeated measures of the same individuals. The Wald test indicated that dissection significantly (p <.01) increased the likelihood of correctly answering a test question. The mean increase was 3%. Additionally, the Wald test indicated there was a significant (p < .01) difference between the various block exams and the number of questions correctly answered when dissected by the student. In block exams 4, 5, and 6 the effect of dissection on the likelihood of correctly answering a question was greater than block exams 1 and 2. In conclusion, this study found the act of dissection impacted the likelihood of correctly answering laboratory exam questions. This study also found an increased likelihood of correctly answering questions in the second half of the class, potentially indicating that as student dissection skills increased, the learning benefits of dissection increased as well. This research highlights the importance of dissection for learning in anatomy. Thus, dissection time allocated to students should be maintained, and possibly increased, in the curriculum whenever possible.

Support or Funding Information

This study was not funded.

This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.