Incorporation of Student Peer-Teaching in a 1st Semester Medical Gross Anatomy Course

The first semester of anatomy at the University of Florida College of Medicine is based upon teaching relevant anatomy as it relates to the physical exam and the utilization of prosections in the anatomy laboratory to see and learn the assigned anatomy. With a class size of ~140 students and with 4 hours allotted to an anatomy laboratory experience per week, students are divided into 10 teams; each team of students are further divided into an orange group and a blue group. Students of 2 groups of the 20 groups decide which of 14 lab sessions they will serve as peer teachers. To prepare for their peer‐teaching experience, they meet a week prior to the selected laboratory session with the teaching faculty to learn the assigned prosected anatomy. Students are expected to practice teaching the assigned anatomy and present one or more 15 minute teaching sessions to the faculty. On the day of an anatomy lab, there were 4 stations of student teachers. Members of the first‐year class rotate to different stations every 15 minutes. The students' perspective of the value of the peer‐teaching has been very positive. An online survey taken this past academic year by students in the first 3 years of training identified that the student peer‐teaching: 1) was beneficial to their learning of assigned laboratory anatomy (84% strongly agreed or agreed) and 2) facilitated their learning of the assigned anatomy by rotating to different stations with different peer teachers (84% strongly agreed or agreed). Quantitative data of the survey and course debriefings further support the view that student peer‐teaching positively augments student learning of anatomy. While some students stated they would be more comfortable with a member of the faculty to teach them, a greater number of students thoroughly enjoyed being taught by their peers; they believed it was the best part of anatomy. In fact, student peer‐teaching is used as a recruitment feature by first and second years when they interact with perspective candidates. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .