Succeeding in a pandemic: Online lectures and in-person laboratory teaching maintained exam scores in the anatomical sciences

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic forced many schools to adopt more online teaching than they would normally have chosen for 2020. While many medical schools canceled laboratory teaching sessions in the anatomical sciences, a minority maintained laboratory teaching, including ours. Due to the pandemic, students had far fewer opportunities to interact with their peers and faculty, and students may have experienced greater non-academic stress, all of which would be expected to negatively impact student academic performance. Also, some faculty members feel that virtual vs. in-person lectures hinder student learning. Taken together, these issues led to significant concern about lower academic performance by first-year medical students in 2020. Our curriculum changed very little between 2019 and 2020, presenting the opportunity to assess the impact of online lectures while keeping the laboratory component essentially unchanged. We hypothesized that maintaining laboratory-based teaching minimized the negative effects of online lectures and student stress in 2020. Methods Academic performance in the anatomical sciences between 2019 (98 students) and 2020 (143 students) was compared using scores from five written and five laboratory exams from Medical Gross Anatomy (MGA) and four histology laboratory exams from the Foundations of Medicine I course (FOM-I). In addition, course evaluation data for the two courses between 2019 and 2020 was compared. Results The exam scores between 2019 and 2020 differed significantly overall (one-way PERMANOVA for non-parametric data, p = 0.003, 9999 permutations). In pairwise comparisons of specific exams between the two years, students in 2020 performed significantly better on one gross anatomy written exam, one gross anatomy laboratory exam, and one histology laboratory exam, whereas 2019 students performed significantly better on one histology laboratory exam (Mann-Whitney U tests, dfs = 239, p-values = 0.02 or less). The mean scores from student course evaluations for both MGA and FOM-I were slightly higher in 2020 compared to 2019, although the differences were not statistically significant (Independent Sample t-tests, dfs = 213, p = 0.23, 0.13, respectively). Discussion These results indicate that the change to all-online lectures with standard in-person laboratory sessions in 2020 did not harm student academic performance in the anatomical sciences. The one lower exam score in histology in 2020 may be due to two additional topics being included on that exam in 2020. If the likely extra-academic stressors that some students may have experienced due to the pandemic (whether from social isolation or direct impact of the disease on family, friends, or themselves) are factored in, the similarity in academic performance in 2019 and 2020 suggests that online lectures paired with in-person laboratory learning may in fact be beneficial for student academic performance, although this would need further investigation. This study will enable comparisons with medical schools that had entirely virtual courses, with either virtual or no laboratory sessions. This study of human subjects was approved by the Texas A&M University Institutional Review Board.