Benefits of Extracurricular Participation in Dissection in a Prosection‐Based Medical Anatomy Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The benefits of cadaveric dissection vs. prosection in medical anatomy education have been extensively debated. The University of Ottawa offers compressed (46.5 lab hours), prosection‐based curricular anatomy education with extracurricular regional dissection electives. This study aimed to characterize benefits related to elective cadaveric dissection. Undergraduate medical students were surveyed in May 2014 regarding motivations and perceived benefits of participation in dissection. The response rate for the survey was 47% (225/478 students). The survey included both Likert‐style items and open‐ended items, which were qualitatively analyzed for emerging themes. We then characterized dissector (DIS) and non‐dissector (NON) student academic performance. The majority of students (70%) participated in at least one dissection elective. The primary motivation for, and benefit derived from, this elective was related to perceived enhancement of clinically relevant anatomical knowledge. Relative to NON group, performance of the DIS group was significantly greater (P<0.001) on practical examinations (+5%), anatomy‐related items (+7%) and discriminating anatomy items (+9%) that typically assessed knowledge application. Finally, performance along these assessment metrics generally was enhanced when students participated in multiple electives. Our results show that dissection electives were valued by the majority of medical students and were perceived to address curricular deficits in clinical anatomy knowledge. Dissection participation had a significant impact on student examination performance, with the largest impact observed on discriminating items related to anatomical knowledge application.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".