73 - An Exploration of the Perspectives of Statewide Anatomy Professors and Medical Students on Learning Resources Used in the Anatomical Disciplines

Poster Board Number: 73
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Abstract Body : Introduction and Objective:
With 365 first-year medical students, Indiana University is the largest allopathic medical school in the United States. Students are distributed among one main school located in Indianapolis and eight satellite campuses around the state of Indiana. This implies that each course is administered and run by nine-course directors across the state. The medical school curriculum is virtually identical across each campus. For this study, we sought to look at professors' and students' opinions of learning resources during their first-year anatomy course, Human Structure. A learning resource was considered anything a student may have utilized to study or learn during the course.

Materials and Methods:
Human Structure is a first-year medical student block course. It is the first block of the medical school curriculum at Indiana University School of Medicine and is scheduled for 9 weeks. The following subjects are covered in the block course: region-based gross anatomy, histology, and embryology. This study included semi-structured interviews with four instructors throughout the state, as well as post-course student audio diaries, to examine perceptions of anatomy learning resources across the state. The interviews and audio diaries were transcribed verbatim. To examine the data, a variant of thematic analysis known as the framework method was utilized to assign codes, which led to the development of categories and themes. This study was authorized by the IU IRB: 16281.

Results:
While many instructors were aware of most of the learning resources used by medical students, the instructors typically hadn’t personally used these resources. Instructors were generally supportive of most study resources used by students, such as third-party resources, including anatomy board review books. Faculty expressed disapproval towards other learning resources, such as rewatching the lecture recordings, while some resources were believed to be underutilized, such as the textbook. They viewed their role as helping students navigate which learning resources they should use throughout the course.
Additional results regarding faculty views on learning resources for human structure are still being evaluated and will be discussed at a later point.

Conclusion:
Overall, these tentative results suggest that while students utilize a range of different study resources, faculty do not validate these supplemental resources personally, but are supportive of their use in general. Additional interviews are currently being conducted, which may shift the overall themes and conclusions being developed. The next steps will be to investigate the faculties' knowledge based on specific supplemental resources based on what they have heard.

Significance/Implications:
This study was conducted as a pilot study with the primary goal of increasing our understanding of faculty views on various learning resources and students' use of these resources in their anatomy courses during their didactic medical education. It is critical to analyze resource utilization so that we can ensure we are using resources that are appropriate for learning the anatomical disciplines. With so many materials being developed, we must evaluate what other resources our students state they are using.

Funding Sources: This project received no funding.