A pragmatic approach to effective anatomy teaching and learning to medical students: A ten-year experience using evidence-based principles

Teaching and learning of anatomy for medical students have been extensively studied. However, we believe that a \u27gold-standard\u27 of an anatomy teaching and learning model is difficult to establish as every educational institution faces unique. For the past ten years at the University of Notre Dame Australia, School of Medicine Sydney, the anatomy faculty has implemented evidence-based teaching strategies adopted from medical schools around the world and supported by timely student feedback to deliver cost-effective and sustainable anatomy learning. Student evaluations of this program have been positive and associated with improved summative anatomy results. This article describes ten principles pursued by our faculty, which we hope will help others in restructuring or enhancing their anatomy teaching and learning program

The use of student narratives as research substrates

Supervising medical students to develop a research project can be challenging. Unless a student has prior experience in research, they may struggle to identify a research question that can be addressed by a novice researcher in a time-limited project. At the same time, when a project spans years of the degree, a student who has been offered an “off-the-shelf” idea may lose interest in the project and the assignment can become burdensome. We describe how a cohort of medical students were encouraged to focus their project ideas on a story of someone whose medical problem was of interest to them. Most students opted to conduct a literature review based on their “story”. Here we present their stories and describe how they were led to this point in the process