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Chapter 1: e A and Science of Learning in Anatomy and Physiology
1.1 e Science of Learning
1.1aForeign, Familiar, and Maste -Level Understanding
Let’s take an example of a person who is learning a new language. We could also use an example of a spectator t ing to learn about the game of baseball, or a student studying physics, or an architect learning about building construction, but let’s take a new language. Let’s say our learner’s name is Talia. Talia goes to Spanish class for the rst time. e teacher speaks in Spanish and Talia understands none of it. She guesses as to the instructions based on the instructors’ gestures and tone of voice. After a few classes, Talia begins to pick up on some of the vocabula of the class. She is learning Spanish words in her own time, using ashcards, online quizzing apps, recognizing phrases. She eventually becomes ve familiar with Spanish words. After a few years, Talia travels to Mexico. She nds she is able to recognize enough Spanish words to be able to understand signs and ads that are printed in Spanish. However, Talia now sits in a cafe in Mexico City. A friendly stranger approaches her and begins to make conversation in Spanish. Will Talia be able to converse with the stranger?
Probably not, because there is a di erence between being familiar with a language and being able to converse in it. Conversation is a skill, a dynamic skill that involves listening, decoding, recall, comprehension, and creativity. Talia has not yet practiced these skills. She has the content she needs but will need to practice the skill of conversation before she can employ it with ease.
Learning A&P (or really most anything) can be thought of the same way: there is the content of what you are learning, and the skills involved in its maste and application. In terms of A&P, we have vocabula , concepts, functions, structures, and locations, and then we need to learn how to connect ideas and apply knowledge in a new context, analyze new data. For example, if you were to become a clinician and a patient had a pain in their abdomen, it would not be su cient to list o a memorized set of organs in the abdomen. You, the clinician, must apply your knowledge of the area and an understanding of the symptoms that the patient is experiencing and analyze the data from clinical tests to diagnose and treat the patient. You must think critically about the information you know and apply it in a new circumstance, one that may be nuanced or unique. erefore, it is insu cient to simply memorize in A&P; we must learn the life-saving skills of application, analysis, and critical thinking.
Let’s go back to Talia, the Spanish language learner, for a moment. Talia needs to engage in separate processes of memorizing vocabula and practicing the skill of conversation. She cannot dive rst into practicing the skill, nor is it su cient to stop at memorization. If we were to diagram Talia’s learning it would look something like Figure 1.1. Talia’s stage 1 of learning happened in the classroom when she was a beginning learner. She is currently at an advanced level of stage 2; she has a lot of vocabula and is able to understand written text and recall meaning. If she practices the skills involved in conversation, she will reach stage 3 —maste of Spanish—and able to converse with ease.
Figure 1.1Stages of Learning
e science of learning tells us that the transition between foreign and familiar is one that is best achieved through repetition and exposure. e methods of repeat exposure may look di erent from one type of learning to another, but in A&P learning, this may look like: reading/rereading your notes, copying your notes over, watching and rewatching lectures, reading and rereading your textbook, and using ashcards to memorize terminology.
e transition from familiarity to maste , however, is a bit di erent. Here, the di erence in our language-learning example is between being able to translate printed words or being uid in a conversation. In A&P, maste means not only being able to identify the deltoid muscle but being able to predict functional de cits with deltoid inju , or being able to identify, based on a set of symptoms, the location of an inju . In fu her maste , you may nd, as a clinician, that you need to communicate about A&P on a variety of levels. For example, you may use one set of terms to discuss a case with a colleague who is also a clinician, but you may need to translate information when conveying it to others in ways that are respectful of their level of knowledge and understanding.
In A&P, examples of practice might include: teaching or explaining the material to someone else, drawing a structure or structures, writing out an explanation of a concept, recreating a graph with explanations, completing practice problems, or answering the question what happens if these components don’t work? (Figure 1.2 and Table 1.1).
Figure 1.2Transitioning Between the Stages of Learning Using a Variety of Learning Techniques
Table 1.
Learning Strategies at Build Familiarity and ose at Build Maste
1.1bMemo Formation and “Chunking”
Eve one has limits to their learning and memo . People who enter memorization competitions (yes! ere are such things!) have a variety of di erent strategies for learning vast quantities of information quickly. e rst technique is quite easy to employ. It is sto telling. Let’s say that you have been asked to remember four words and recall them back four hours later. e four items are cookie, staircase, yellow, and music. Imagine you go about the rest of your day for the next four hours and then are asked to recall these four random words. Few people would be able to do so easily. But what if you paused for a moment, after getting your list of words, and created a quick sto or visual for learning (Cookie monster is sitting on the bright yellow staircase listening to his favorite music )? If you paint this image in your mind, it is much more likely that you will be able to remember the four words a long time from now. Similarly, in A&P we can create sho stories known as mnemonic devices. For example, there are 12 ne es that exit the brain and inne ate structures mostly found in the head and neck. ese 12 ne es are known as cranial ne es.
Familiarity-Building Learning Strategies Maste -Building Learning Strategies Reading Drawing a representation of an anatomical structure Looking over notes Teaching someone else the material Copying notes over Quizzing yourself Flashcards Having a friend quiz you Listening to/watching lectures Explaining a process Labeling an unlabeled drawing Ordering the pa s of a process after mixing them up Looking at a process you’ve learned, ask yourself about each component "what would happen if this was broken, how would that impact the entire process?"
1.1cRetrieval Practice
Retrieval practice refers to memo strengthening. e more often you are asked to recall information, the easier it becomes to remember. Let’s say that you change the passcode to your new mobile phone, email account, or favorite website. e rst few times you enter this passcode it may be di cult to remember, but after the thi ieth time you’ve logged in, the passcode becomes rote, or habitual. e learning concept of retrieval practice is pa of the philosophy behind assigning homework or quizzes or in-class questions during a course. e more times you are asked about a concept, a structure, or an idea, the more habitual it becomes to recall that piece of information. Your instructor may provide oppo unities for you to practice retrieval, such as quizzes, but you can do this for yourself as a learner as well.
Examples of retrieval practice in studying can be:
Retrieval practice is a great tool to use as you move from foreign to familiar in your learning.
1.2Bloom’s Taxonomy
In our example of learning a new language, we di erentiated between content (words, concepts, ideas) and skills (application, analysis, and so on). In education there is a well-accepted framework for considering the skills involved in a question or task. e framework is called Bloom’s Taxonomy (Figure 1.3).
Figure 1.3Bloom’s Taxonomy
Greater omentum Small intestine Large intestine Lesser omentum Liver Mesocolon
Large intestine Liver
Lesser omentum Mesocolon
using ashcards, redrawing, or rewriting from memo . labeling an unlabeled diagram. paraphrasing a process or idea (especially e ective if you are t ing to tell someone else about this process or idea). predicting what questions could be asked of you about a structure/concept/idea. summarizing information at the end of a section or chapter.
e framework conveys a few central points:
You can talk with your instructor about what to expect on your assessments in your A&P course. Within this book we label the assessment questions with the Bloom’s level the question is targeting to get you familiar with your skills and growth areas. It is common for 70 - 80 percent of the questions on an exam to be either remembering or understanding questions, and 20 - 30 percent of the questions to be applying or analyzing questions. Your instructor may also include questions or tasks that target the creating Bloom’s level in your course. Study strategies that target each Bloom’s level are summarized in Table 1.3.
Table 1.
Learning Strategies and Question Examples at Target Each Bloom’s Level
Di erent assessment questions or tasks target di erent skills. If you are asked, "which of the following words best de nes the term tissue ?" You are being asked to recall the de nition of tissue. If, instead, you were asked "You are looking through the microscope at a tissue that has a high degree of cellularity, with eve cell contacting another cell except for a free edge at the top of your view. What type of tissue are you most likely looking at?" You are being asked to apply what you know about tissue types to a new situation you have never encountered before. ese tasks and the skills involved are di erent from each other. ese skills are iterative. You cannot apply information in a new context if you cannot remember it. erefore, application depends on knowledge. e skills build on each other, but one is not necessarily harder than another. It could be more challenging to apply knowledge than to remember something, but if you were asked a remembering question about a tiny obscure tidbit of knowledge, or asked to apply a general concept, the application question in this case would be easier than the remembering question. Eve one is working with a di erent brain. Some students are natural memoriz-ers; these students need to work on their skills of application and analysis. Some students struggle with memorization, but problem solving comes easily to them. To be the most successful, you need to learn about yourself as a learner rst, then work on the skills that need the most building.
Bloom’s Level Skills Example Question Individual Strategies Group Strategies Remember Memorize De ne Recall details
Which of these is the correct de nition of osmolarity?
Practice labeling diagrams List characteristics
Check a drawing that another student labeled
e activities that you use to study and learn can incorporate all these ideas. As you study you want to make sure you move from familiarity-building techniques to maste -building techniques (Table 1.1). You also want to be sure to incorporate activities that target di erent Bloom’s levels (Table 1.3). Remember that no two learners have the same brain; therefore, the ways that you learn best may ve well be di erent from those of a friend or even your instructor! As you progress through your education, you will discover that some learning strategies work for you and some do not! You may also nd that some strategies work better for some material, while other strategies are more adapted for other courses. For example, you may nd di erences in how you approach even A&P material within the same course. Ultimately, as you become more in tune with your learning processes, you will have a better sense of which strategies to apply when and in what order.
1.3What Is a Learning Objective?
Learning objectives (LOs) are used as a means of transparency between the instructor and the learner. ey are, essentially, a means of answering the age-old student question: What are we supposed to learn? In this book we have included LOs at the top of eve section of text. e LOs appear again at the end of each chapter along with questions that target those objectives. e goal of this design is to help you to become familiar with anticipating the types of assessment questions you want to prepare for. e text indicates higher-order and lower-order Bloom’s level LOs using di erent icons. Remember that you may want to use di erent learning strategies for di erent levels. Your instructor may have additional LOs that they include in their lectures or syllabus. Again, LOs are tools of transparency; your instructor is communicating with you about what they feel is impo ant for you to learn. You can also ask your instructor questions when you are unsure of your objectives. An example of an LO and how to use it in your learning can be found in Figure 1.4.
Figure 1.4Anatomy of a Learning Objective (LO)
Example LO from Chapter 4 and one approach to learning the material it targets.
maps and defend your own Evaluate Justify a conclusion Choose a best among a group of plausible explanations
Which of these diseases is likely to cause an increase in osmolarity of the blood?
Practice justi cation of each of the wrong answers for complex questions
Justify your stance to your group on each answer of case study questions Create Produce a new work, idea, or writing
Design a solution that is hyperosmotic to blood plasma. Describe the e ects on the tissues (and red blood cells) if this solution was injected into the bloodstream
Write a paragraph summarizing a major idea or process Draw your own physiological diagram to illustrate a concept or process
Design your own ctional case study and ask your peers to do the same. Exchange case studies for each other to solve
1.4 e Anatomy of A
1.4aImage Translation in Anatomy
Learning anatomy will require a skill you have likely not had a lot of time to practice in your education: learning visually. Unlike most of your classes where the majority of your interaction with the material was through words or numbers, anatomy—and to some extent physiology—really asks that you learn images. In pa icular, you will be asked to transfer your visual understanding from images you have seen before to novel images. You will often nd that you have studied an image from one perspective, only to need to translate to another. For example, if you have studied an image from the front, you will use what you understand about the three-dimensional relationships among the organs or structures to be able to break down and understand an image of the same area taken from above. Similarly, studying tissues through microscopes is challenging for the rst few times you do it. After practice, your ability to translate what you see to the structures you have learned will grow. Beginning A&P students often nd these skills challenging, until they practice them over time. Looking at a new image can be overwhelming at rst. Like many anatomists, you may nd it helpful to rst nd a landmark, a structure you know well. From that landmark, you can begin to identify the other structures around it that you recognize. In Figure 1.5 you can walk through this process. Figure 1.5A illustrates a simple and straightforward diagram of the hea from an anterior (front) perspective. For simplicity, only three structures are labeled in this exercise. Now examine Figure 1.5B, which is an image of the same organ in the same perspective (anterior/front) but drawn by a di erent a ist. Can you nd the three structures? Now examine Figure 1.5C. Here you are looking at the same organ (the hea ) from a di erent perspective (superior/from above). Find your three structures again. Repeating this strategy with new images is a great way to work toward maste . In your study process, you can repeat this with unlabeled images as many times as is helpful to you. A last step in this process can be to draw the image for yourself. Keep in mind that the point of this is not about a ist , but that working through the task of representing the relationship among anatomical structures is a fantastic way to assess your maste of the material.
Figure 1.5Image Translation
Anatomy requires visual literacy and image translation. Here we compare two drawings of the anterior perspective of the hea (A and B) with a superior perspective of the hea (C). Translating these diagrams to a photo (D) and nally an MRI (E) requires a strong working knowledge of the hea structures.
1.4cLearning from Physiology or Process Diagrams
Illustrating a dynamic process in a static image is a challenging task for our illustrators. ese images, as straightforward as we t to make them, can be complicated to digest as a learner.
Before you set about t ing to memorize or learn from a gure, make sure that you understand what the gure is t ing to convey. Together, let’s go through Figure 1.7. is is a fairly standard drawing of a foundational physiological concept (osmosis). As we break down this image, some questions you might ask yourself are:
Figure 1.7An Example Figure Illustrating the Movement of Water in Response to an Osmotic Gradient
ere are four di erent arrows used in the image—one orange, one green, a single-headed arrow in black, and a double-headed arrow in black. What are the arrows t ing to illustrate? ere are red dots. What do these represent? Is it signi cant that the red dots are on one side of the U-shaped tube and not the other? ere is a dashed line at the bottom of this tube. What does it represent? Is this image t ing to show two U-shaped tubes side-by-side, or is it t ing to show what happens in one tube over time?
Arrows are of pa icular trickiness in physiological diagrams. ey can be used to show the direction of movement in a dynamic process, used to convey time, or used to illustrate di erences. In this image they are doing all three things! Which arrow do you think is t ing to convey the passage of time? If you answered the green arrow, you are correct! e orange arrow is t ing to convey the direction of movement, in this case of water. In the U-shaped tube on the right, time has passed, water has moved, and the black arrow is pointing out to you that an increase in water volume can be obse ed.
Asking yourself questions about a gure you are learning from not only ensures that you are beginning your learning with the correct understanding but also works to fo ify your knowledge of the key components of the process. You should also take into consideration the gure legend and related text to assist in your interpretation of a diagram.
Cultural Connection It’s All Greek to Me!
e average A&P student will learn more new vocabula words in each chapter than an introducto language student! Similar to learning any language, A&P students must memorize the words but also master how to use these words in communication with others. Conveniently, there is some redundancy within A&P terminology and so you can often use clues to understand the words. e majority of terms used in A&P are derived from ancient Greek and Latin words. More speci cally, a predominant number of anatomical terms come from Latin, and a predominant number of medical terms (e.g., conditions, diseases, professions, and so on) come from ancient Greek. e emphasis on using these two languages likely originated with the ve rst anatomical study, which occurred in ancient Rome and early medicine and which was a focus in ancient Greece. Anatomists described structures in the body using plain descriptors, but as language changed over the centuries we were left with ve complex terminology. For example, in Chapter 3 you will learn the term ligand. e rst half of this word, liga, is from the Latin lig-are , which means "to bind." Later, in Chapter 10, you will learn the term ligament ; a ligament is a structure that connects, or binds, two bones together. Doing the work in Chapter 3 to understand the origin of liga makes learning in Chapter 10 easier! roughout the text we will assist you with the interpretation of these Greek and Latin-derived words.
As a student your prima goal is to master the content of this course. However, this herculean task is much easier if you know about yourself as a learner and have an array of tools to employ in your process. As you go through the course, consider which tools are working for you and which content or skill areas you have the most room to grow in. It is impo ant to make sure you incorporate a variety of diverse learning techniques into your journey to maste of the material. You will nd tips and strategies throughout the book, but your instructors and this chapter are resources that are always available as you consider, obse e, and re ne your learning techniques.
