Hello Doug,
Our Microscopic Anatomy courses at Drexel University College of Medicine (DUCOM) are among those that use scavenger hunts in some lab sessions. We have two curricular tracks - one problem based (the Program for Integrated Learning or PIL) where Haviva Goldman serves as course director and one organized around symptom-based modules (Interdisciplinary Foundations of Medicine or IFM) where I am course director. The scavenger hunts work somewhat differently in each, so let me describe the elements common to both, and then point out some of the differences. We have six lab cubicles, each with seven tables, usually with five students at a table. For each hunt we generate seven different lists of structures for the students to find, so that each table in a cubicle is working on a different list. Each list includes five structures, which allows every member of the group to lead the hunt for at least one structure. For every group, some structures are simply listed by name, while others are only described according to some characteristic structural or functional feature. For example one list might include "parietal cell", while for another hunt we might replace that with "cell that produces intrinsic factor". For each correct identification, every student in the group receives one point, so a scavenger hunt is essentially a five-point lab quiz.
In IFM the students find the structures on glass slides from their own slide boxes. The hunts generally cover about four different lab sessions, so students are working with more than one tissue or organ system. When everyone in the group agrees with an identification, they show the structure to their instructor and then move on to the next item in their list. In both IFM and PIL, the instructor will generally ask one or two follow-up questions about their structure just to get them thinking more about it, but the answers to those off-the-cuff questions are not graded. After the hunt, the IFM students use the rest of the lab time to go on to study the next organ system.
In PIL the students find their structures on virtual slides rather than glass slides, take screen shots of the structures, create a PowerPoint from those screenshots, have their presentation checked by their instructor, and then submit it electronically. Since there are fewer student groups per cubicle in PIL, there is time at the end of the lab session to project each PowerPoint and go over the structures for the students. Each PIL lab session includes, and in fact essentially consists of a scavenger hunt since the students are expected to do the preparatory lab work online outside of scheduled lab time.
I hope that gives you some idea of how we use scavenger hunts. The students seem to enjoy them and always rate them highly on our course evaluations. They certainly stimulate discussion, and do clear up a large number of misconceptions.
Please let me or Haviva know if you have any questions.
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Janet Smith
Professor
Drexel University College of Medicine
Philadelphia PA
215-991-8474
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-03-2014 09:05
From: Douglas Paulsen
Subject: Is a lab a must in histology courses?
I'm truly enjoying this discussion and the variety of perspectives and approaches that have been described. Like Dave Bolender, I would like to hear more about ways to combine histology and histopathology as a teaching tool. I have been especially interested in finding ways to introduce some basic histopathological concepts along with the presentation of normal histology without necessarily delving fully into more detailed histopathology, which might be more distracting than helpful to the students learning histo in the first year of medical school. I am not a pathologist, but a possible example of what I'm considering is lymphocyte infiltration of otherwise healthy tissues. We see this, for example, in many of our slides of tonsils where lymphocyte infiltration into the characteristic covering epithelia sometimes confounds the students. Comparisons of necrosis and apoptosis might be another example. It would be wonderful to have a list of such basic histopathologies broken out by histo lecture topic that we could begin incorporating into both lectures and labs. If anyone knows of such a simple listing, please let us know).
The other idea I wanted to mention to the group that I've heard of others using, but which I haven't had the time to implement here, is including a histology scavenger hunt as an active learning component for each laboratory. In the example I heard about, a checklist of structures was provided to the students as groups, who found the structures on virtual slides and were checked off by faculty or teaching assistants. I can think of a number of ways that could be implemented both in the lab and online. I'd love to read descriptions of the use of that approach including what works and what doesn't and how to increase the fun factor. This would be a possible answer to the question about approaches to team or group learning in the histo lab.
Happy 4th everyone :)
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Douglas Paulsen
Professor, Associate Dean
Morehouse School of Medicine
Atlanta GA
404-752-1559
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-02-2014 10:24
From: Mohammed Khalil
Subject: Is a lab a must in histology courses?
I followed this discussion with very much interest. From my experience and research, the laboratory provides great opportunities for active self-directed learning experiences, integration of histology with physiology and pathology, development of team skills (mainly communication/coordination), and also an opportunity to provide feedback for the development of professionalism. Thoughtful design of the lab activities will contribute to achieving the medical knowledge, interpersonal and communication, and professionalism as part of ACGME 6 core competencies domains.
Our experience using the virtual microscopes is published in our Anatomical Sciences Education journal (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ase.1350/abstract). Students indicated that the laboratory experience facilitated their learning by reinforcing and clarifying classroom sessions, improved their understanding, facilitated active and cooperative learning, and supported self-monitoring of their learning
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Mohammed Khalil
Associate Professor
University of South Carolina, School of Medicine - Greenville
864-455-9825
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-29-2014 21:37
From: Michael Hortsch
Subject: Is a lab a must in histology courses?
Lisa,
As I indicated in my answer to Doug, it depends what you mean with "truly learn histology". At least in my definition, a lab session or independent work with virtual slides is necessary to "truly learn histology". That makes teaching histology without a real lab session an additional challenge. It appears that we at the University of Michigan teach histology to dental students very similar to you at CU. A lecture to introduce the "facts" is followed with a lecture-style introduction to the virtual slides. However, no real lab session with faculty supervision is offered. Dental students are expected to work with the virtual slides at their own time and I push the use of the Michigan dental histology website (http://histology.med.umich.edu/schedule/dental). As most dental students are less motivated to learn histology (at least when compared to medical students), this makes our teaching mission more demanding. A few days ago I mentioned our recent paper, which compares medical and dental students' learning strategies when learning histology (Johnson et al., Eur. J. Dent. Educ., online http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eje.12104/abstract).
We had a now retired colleague, who also liked to draw elaborate pictures on a whiteboard. At one point he took photos of his drawings and we now offer them to our students as supplemental PowerPoint files. There are freely available and can be downloaded at http://open.umich.edu/education/med/resources/histology-laboratory-drawings. It is not the most popular supplementary learning tool, but a few students appreciate the drawings.
I definitely do not use images that were used in lectures or in other material provided to the students for the exams. Yes, that makes the exams more difficult for our students. However, in my opinion pure image recognition has very little educational value. I believe students can be challenged, just as long as they feel fairly treated and as long as we provide them with the opportunities to succeed by hard work and as long as we provide them appropriate learning resources.
All of you have a good workweek
Michael
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Michael Hortsch
Associate Professor
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor MI
734-647 2720
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-27-2014 11:29
From: Lisa Lee
Subject: Is a lab a must in histology courses?
Hello all,
I learned my histology using both optical and virtual microcopy. I have also taught with both modalities. I cannot deny that there is much to be gained and appreciated from the mechanical interaction with optical microscopes and glass slades. But I am in the camp that the accessibility, efficiency, convenience and many more advantages that Doug and others have brought up make virtual labs a superior educational tool.
There is another aspect of Bob's question though... and that is whether any type of lab (optical or virtual) is necessary for histology.
Here at CU, dental students have a seven-week histology course (2.5 credits). The course consists of only lectures and no lab of any kind. This is a team-taught course, so lectures are quite variable but most lecture slides contain bullet point notes and accompanying static images. Some artistic instructors spend the entire lecture hour drawing a beautiful histology image on the white board. I am the only instructor in that course who provides links to virtual slides but I don't always have the time to go over them in class - few students bother to clink on those links and even if they do, they have no clue as to what they are looking at. Exams do contain some static images from lecture slides and students do fine on them - probably because they memorize the images. Further, I know that at least for step 1 dental board exam, there is no image based histology questions (at least for now) - so it's a hard sell to push lab on these students. What are your thoughts on this? Do you know of any other histology courses (undergrad, grad, med, dent... etc) that have no lab component? Can students truly learn histology without any kind of lab experience?
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Lisa Lee
Associate Professor
University of Colorado School of Medicine
Aurora CO
303-724-7460
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