Synthetic cadavers improved laboratory test grades in an undergraduate human anatomy course
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explored the use of an intriguing instrument which may provide a very similar, yet more sustainable, experience to human cadaver dissection in anatomy courses. The synthetic cadaver is structurally similar to a human cadaver but does not carry the same ethical and sustainability challenges. Students in an undergraduate human anatomy course completed two laboratory tests: Test 1 was completed prior to the introduction of two synthetic cadavers to the laboratory where the primary laboratory resources were plastic models. Test 2 was completed after the synthetic cadavers were introduced. Comparison of student lab test grades both pre and post synthetic cadaver introduction (“Experimental”) as well as to “Historical” cohorts of the course were used to assess student success. In addition, surveys comprised of 5‐point Likert items were used to assess student perceptions. Test 1 grades in the Experimental and Historical cohorts were compared to ensure that no academic differences existed between groups (p = 0.7653; z‐statistic = 0.2985). Students in the Experimental group performed better on Test 2 (median = 73.8% (95% CI: 72.0–75.0%) compared to the Historical group (70.1% (95% CI: 68.4%–70.1%), p < 0.0001). Students perceived laboratory resources to be necessary (95%), helpful (94%) and effective (87%), yet there was no change in these perceptions following the introduction of the synthetic cadavers. This investigation indicates that the synthetic cadavers were an effective learning tool in undergraduate human anatomy, and that student success was improved after using the synthetic cadavers, compared to when only plastic models were available. Support or Funding Information No funding was received for this work. Probability density estimates for laboratory test grades in the Historical (light blue) and Experimental (dark blue) cohorts. Grey areas represent the 95% confidence interval for the median grade. There was no difference in median Test 1 grades; however, the median Test 2 grade in the Experimental cohort was significantly higher than in the Historical cohort. Figure 1
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".