Clinical Anatomy Remote Learning: A Multimethod Study of Actual and Perceived Anatomical Knowledge

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic forced academic institutions fully online in March of 2020. At the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, anatomy faculty prepared for remote delivery of the Clinical Anatomy curriculum for newly matriculating dental and PA students. Faculty created dissection videos and synchronous lesson plans for lecture and laboratory video review sessions. Two purposes of this research were to assess academic outcomes and survey student perspectives of remote Clinical Anatomy. A third purpose was to determine relationships between outcomes and perceptions. Summative and formative assessment items were compared between a 2020 remote and a historical 2019 face-to-face cohort. For the 2020 remote cohort, a survey was developed to assess student perspectives of anatomical knowledge. Results indicated an increase in academic outcomes for the 2020 remote cohort. Remote students reported adequate cognitive domain gains in anatomical knowledge, but many perceived a lack of psychomotor and affective domain learning as a lost opportunity. Anatomy educators should seek online teaching pedagogies that support different modalities of student learning, and administrators need to consider student learning needs beyond the cognitive domain in order to promote teaching methods that develop professionalism and non-traditional discipline- independent skills (NTDIS).