Using situational physiology in a didactic lecture setting.

This project used the approach of "human situations" to teach about the cardiovascular system within an undergraduate physiology course (PGY 412). About two-thirds of the students had previously taken a college-level physiology course (sophisticated), whereas one-third had not (naive). Nine didactic lectures were organized around the common human situations of orthostasis, blood donation, and exercise. For acceptance evaluation, the students were given a questionnaire consisting of six expectation statements (e.g., compared with other life science courses, I expect that I will better understand the material) and asked to rate the degree to which they agreed with each statement on a scale of 1 to 5. On completion of the lectures, the students were given a questionnaire asking them to compare experiences with expectations. Experiences were significantly less than expectations for naive (P < 0.05) but not for sophisticated students. On a scale of 1 to 5, sophisticated students preferred the situations approach more than did naive students (3.1 vs 2.4; P < 0.066). For performance evaluation, the students were given a set of questions used by the author in a previous PGY 412 course presented by traditional didactic lectures. There were no significant differences between present and previous scores (77 vs. 79%; P > 0.16). Furthermore, there were no significant differences between naive and sophisticated students in cardiovascular examination scores (P > 0.608) or in total course scores (P > 0.523). These results indicate that didactic lectures based on situational physiology will yield a performance outcome equivalent to traditional lectures. However, naive students may have difficulty with the procedure and require extra attention.