Approximately 700 undergraduates studying physiology at community colleges, a liberal arts college, and universities were surveyed to determine the prevalence of our misconceptions about respiratory phenomena. A misconception about the changes in breathing frequency and tidal volume (physiological variables whose changes can be directly sensed) that result in increased minute ventilation was found to be present in this population with comparable prevalence (approximately 60%) to that seen in a previous study. Three other misconceptions involving phenomena that cannot be experienced directly and therefore were most likely learned in some educational setting were found to be of varying prevalence. Nearly 90% of the students exhibited a misconception about the relationship between arterial oxygen partial pressure and hemoglobin saturation. Sixty-six percent of the students believed that increasing alveolar oxygen partial pressure leads to a decrease in alveolar carbon dioxide partial pressure. Nearly 33% of the population misunderstood the relationship between metabolism and ventilation. The possible origins of these respiratory misconceptions are discussed and suggestions for how to prevent and/or remediate them are proposed.
Undergraduates students in 12 courses at 8 different institutions were surveyed to determine the prevalence of 13 different misconceptions (conceptual difficulties) about cardiovascular function. The prevalence of these misconceptions ranged from 20 to 81% and, for each misconception, was consistent across the different student populations. We also obtained explanations for the students' answers either as free responses or with follow-up multiple-choice questions. These results suggest that students have a number of underlying conceptual difficulties about cardiovascular phenomena. One possible source of some misconceptions is the students' inability to apply simple general models to specific cardiovascular phenomena. Some implications of these results for teachers of physiology are discussed.
Numerous articles have been published on the merits of active learning, and collectively they present a body of compelling evidence that these methods do enhance learning. In presenting arguments for active learning, it is often suggested that the traditional didactic lecture is more passive in nature and less effective as a teaching tool. However, a well organized lecture remains one of the most effective ways to integrate and present information from multiple sources on complex topics, such as those encountered in the teaching of physiology. This article presents an argument for enhancing lectures by incorporating active learning activities within their framework, and it is noted that engagement of the student is a key element making active learning activities work. Finally, suggestions are provided on the basis of the author's experience of things instructors can do to make lecture-based courses more engaging to students and, hence, promote learning.
Teachers establish prerequisites that students must meet before they are permitted to enter their courses. It is expected that having these prerequisites will provide students with the knowledge and skills they will need to successfully learn the course content. Also, the material that the students are expected to have previously learned need not be included in a course. We wanted to determine how accurate instructors' understanding of their students background knowledge actually was. To do this, we wrote a set of multiple-choice questions that could be used to test students' knowledge of concepts deemed to be essential for learning respiratory physiology. Instructors then selected 10 of these questions to be used as a prerequisite knowledge test. The instructors also predicted the performance they expected from the students on each of the questions they had selected. The resulting tests were administered in the first week of each of seven courses. The results of this study demonstrate that instructors are poor judges of what beginning students know. Instructors tended to both underestimate and overestimate students' knowledge by large margins on individual questions. Although on the average they tended to underestimate students' factual knowledge, they overestimated the students' abilities to apply this knowledge. Hence, the validity of decisions that instructors make, predicated on the basis of their students having the prerequisite knowledge that they expect, is open to question.
Pedagogy and andragogy are models of education based, respectively, on passive and active learning. This project compared two balanced sections of an undergraduate course in physiology. Both sections used the pedagogical method of didactic lectures to present basic material. Students in section 01 were given multiple-choice examinations, a pedagogical procedure, over the lecture content for the purpose of performance evaluation. In section 02 the lectures were used as an information source, which students combined with other information researched in the library to draft essays on assigned topics, i.e., an andragogical approach. Grading of the essays constituted 75% of a student's performance evaluation, with participation in class discussions making up the remaining 25%. There was no significant difference in overall performance outcome between the two sections (P > 0.47). Students from both sections valued the lectures, even though they served a different purpose in each section. However, overall the student rating of section 02 was significantly higher than that of section 01 (P < or = 0.05). This reflected different teaching methods rather than different teachers, because the ratings of the two instructors were virtually identical (P > 0.98). These results suggest that a combined pedagogical and andragogical approach is an acceptable model for teaching introductory physiology.
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