Advances in Physiology Education, Vol 271, Issue 6 61-S67, Copyright © 1996 by American Physiological Society
Using situational physiology in a didactic lecture setting
D. Richardson
Department of Physiology, University of Kentucky, College of Medicine, Lexington 40536-0084, USA.
This project used the approach of "human situations" to teach about the
cardiovascular system within an undergraduate physiology course (PGY 412).
About two-thirds of the students had previously taken a college-level
physiology course (sophisticated), whereas one-third had not (naive). Nine
didactic lectures were organized around the common human situations of
orthostasis, blood donation, and exercise. For acceptance evaluation, the
students were given a questionnaire consisting of six expectation
statements (e.g., compared with other life science courses, I expect that I
will better understand the material) and asked to rate the degree to which
they agreed with each statement on a scale of 1 to 5. On completion of the
lectures, the students were given a questionnaire asking them to compare
experiences with expectations. Experiences were significantly less than
expectations for naive (P < 0.05) but not for sophisticated students. On
a scale of 1 to 5, sophisticated students preferred the situations approach
more than did naive students (3.1 vs 2.4; P < 0.066). For performance
evaluation, the students were given a set of questions used by the author
in a previous PGY 412 course presented by traditional didactic lectures.
There were no significant differences between present and previous scores
(77 vs. 79%; P > 0.16). Furthermore, there were no significant
differences between naive and sophisticated students in cardiovascular
examination scores (P > 0.608) or in total course scores (P > 0.523).
These results indicate that didactic lectures based on situational
physiology will yield a performance outcome equivalent to traditional
lectures. However, naive students may have difficulty with the procedure
and require extra attention.
