Advances in Physiology Education

The flipped classroom is an innovative pedagogy that shifts content delivery outside the classroom, utilizing in-class time for interactive learning. The pre-class and in-class activities in this framework encourage individualized learning and collaborative problem-solving among students, fostering engagement. The Innovative Flipped Learning Instruction Project (IFLIP) conducted faculty development workshops over four years, guiding STEM faculty in integrating flipped teaching (FT) into their courses. The research aimed to assess its impact on pedagogical practices, explore its effectiveness, and provide a framework to implement FT across multiple institutions...

This study aimed to compare the impact of the partially flipped physiology classroom (PFC) and the traditional lecture-based classroom (TLC) on students' learning approaches. The study was conducted over five months at Xiangya School of Medicine from February to July 2022 and comprised 71 students majoring in clinical medicine. The experimental group (n = 32) received PFC teaching, while the control group (n = 39) received TLC. The Revised Two-Factor Study Process Questionnaire (R-SPQ-2F) was used to assess the impact of different teaching methods on students' learning approaches...

A central topic in Bioelectricity is the generation of the extracellular potential that results from the propagation of a transmembrane action potential along the muscle fiber. However, the way in which the extracellular potential is determined by the propagating action potential is difficult to describe, conceptualize and visualize. Moreover, traditional quantitative approaches aimed at modelling extracellular potentials involve complex mathematical formulations, which do not allow students to visualize how the extracellular potential is generated around the active fiber...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The traditional case study has been used as a learning tool for the past 100 years and in our program, graduate physiology students are presented with a real-world scenario and must determine the diagnosis and treatment of the patient. We found that students defaulted to memorization of disease with treatment and bypassed gaining an understanding of the mechanistic physiology behind disease and treatment. To adjust our student's approach, we developed a novel way to enhance student learning. In order to accomplish this shift from memorization to physiological mastery, we created the Inverted Case Study...

We offered an enrichment program for high school students with the theme " The Environment, Health, and You" during the Summer of 2022 and the Spring of 2023. We developed several educational modules for high school students that provided them with an opportunity to learn and explore the foundations of physiological systems, nutrient needs to maintain health, and the impact that environmental factors can have on them. The modules included videos, discussion boards, games, readings, and labs. These modules were integrated into the first session: Your Body and Health...

Water movement across the cell membrane is crucial, with red blood cells experiencing the flow of water in both directions at a rate of approximately 100 times their own volume per second. This process typically results in no net water flow due to an equal balance of diffusion in opposite directions, a phenomenon known as osmosis, driven by water potential or impermeant solute concentration. Understanding osmosis is essential for both physiology and medical practice, yet its complexity may not be effectively conveyed to the students through traditional teaching methods...

Intro Medical students face challenging but important topics they must learn in short periods of time such as autonomic pharmacology. Autonomic pharmacology is difficult in that it requires students to synthesize detailed anatomy, physiology, clinical skills, and pharmacology. The subject poses a challenge to learn as it is often introduced early in the medical school curriculum. Methods To ease the difficulty of learning autonomic pharmacology, we created a free web application, PharmaMemory (www.pharmamemory...

Emotional intelligence (EI) has a positive correlation with the academic performance of medical students. However, why there is a positive correlation needs further exploration. We hypothesized that the capability of answering higher-order knowledge questions (HOQs) is higher in students with higher EI. Hence, we assessed the correlation between EI and the capability of medical students to answer HOQs in Physiology. First-year undergraduate medical students (n = 124) from an Indian medical college were recruited as a convenient sample...

Medical students must be adept at critical thinking to successfully meet the learning objectives of their pre-clinical coursework. To encourage student success on assessments, the course director of a first- year medical physiology course emphasized the use of learning objectives that were explicitly aligned with formative assessments in class. The course director introduced the physiology discipline, learning objectives and evidence-based methods of studying to students on the first day of class. Thereafter, class sessions started with a review of the learning objectives for that session and included active learning opportunities such as retrieval practice...

Effective communication skills are pivotal in health care, particularly when conveying distressing information to patients and their families. However, medical education still lacks the adoption of a universal model that can be incorporated into the curricula to train and assess students in effectively communicating with patients. This study aims to assess the impact of training undergraduate medical students to deliver bad news effectively using the "EMBRACE" (Empowering Medical students' skills in BReaking bAd news with Compassion and Empathy) Module...

Pharmacists are increasingly becoming the healthcare professional that interacts most regularly with patients who have diseases or disorders for which exercise is an effective and recommended treatment. With the relative scarcity of clinical exercise physiologists in the US, pharmacists are expected to provide lifestyle advice to their patients, especially in community (i.e. retail) pharmacy settings, but student pharmacists typically receive no formal or informal training in exercise physiology and prescription...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Views of obesity as a consequence of "lack of willpower" or other behavioral choices, rather than a complex array of biological and other factors, are quite common among undergraduate students. Many undergraduates in pre-nursing or biology programs have little exposure to the physiology and pathophysiology of obesity, including learning about leptin and other hormones involved in appetite control. I developed materials for teaching about the pathophysiology of obesity in two different pathophysiology courses: one designed as a survey of pathophysiology topics for pre-nursing majors, and the other designed as an in-depth exploration of the molecular and cellular basis of selected diseases for upper division biology majors...

Diabetes mellitus and obesity are major public health issues that significantly impact the health care system. The next generation of health-care providers will need a deep understanding of the pathophysiology of these diseases if we are to prevent, treat, and eventually cure these diseases and ease the burden on patients and the health care system. Physiology Core Concepts are a set of core principles, or "big ideas", identified by physiology educators that are thought to promote long-term retention, create a deeper understanding, and help with formation of critical thinking skills...

Early year's physiology education in medical curricula provides unique challenges. As well as inculcating concepts that are seen as difficult, modern curricula require that students learn in context in Case Based Learning courses. Additionally, regulating bodies stress that the soft skills of compassion, communication and empathy are embedded throughout curricula. This has driven work in our organisation involving drama and final year medicine students during which they collaborate in realistic simulations of doctor/patient interactions...

Critical thinking is a common and important learning outcome in college curricula. Case-based and problem-based learning can be used to assess and foster critical thinking skills. HNF 250- Contemporary Issues in Human Nutrition is a critical thinking course developed during the redesign of a nutritional sciences major program. Course assignments were designed to assess the course and nutritional sciences major learning outcomes. The nutrition and health claim assignment is scaffolded across the academic semester as three assignments: 1)bibliography assignment;, 2) poster presentation; and 3) paper...

In order to improve the physical education experience for students, this study investigates the idea of an integrated solution based on a smart campus for physical education. Within the physical education curriculum, the study focuses on the integration of smart fitness monitoring and wearables, interactive fitness equipment and gamification, mobile applications and customized workout plans, smart facilities, indoor navigation, and data-driven curriculum enhancements. The data gathered from a study involving two groups of students, an experimental group with access to smart campus solutions and a control group without such access, was analyzed using a well-designed framework...

UK university undergraduate programs are compared by independent subject-specific rankings (Complete, Guardian, Times), based upon data from National Student Survey, Higher Education Statistics Agency, Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, Research Excellence Framework, and the universities. The sports and exercise science program at University of Glasgow, has steadily risen to currently rank as the top UK program. This investigation aimed to identify the underlying factors that explain this. Therefore, we obtained underlying scores for entry standard, student satisfaction, research foundation, graduate prospects, staff-student ratio, expenditure/student, continuation, program support to students, and teaching quality from the ranking providers for years 2010-2024, and statistically modelled which factors significantly affected the rankings...

Queer students in undergraduate STEM majors are more likely to drop out than their cisgender, heterosexual peers despite having equivalent grades and research exposure. It has been demonstrated that sense of belonging, a very strong predictor of student retention, is low in queer-identified STEM undergraduates. It has further been posited that faculty openness and authenticity can enhance sense of belonging for queer students through the creation of an inclusive classroom culture. The authors of this article, three queer-identified faculty in the health sciences department at Boston University, surveyed students enrolled in their courses to elicit student thoughts, feelings, and behaviors regarding the effect of faculty 1) sharing their identity openly in the classroom, and 2) actively working to create open, inclusive dialogue and space in their classrooms...