Physiology is hard: a replication study of students' perceived learning difficulties

Area of Science:

• Physiology Education Research
• Human Anatomy and Physiology (HAP)

Background:

• Human Anatomy and Physiology (HAP) is widely perceived as a challenging course.
• Previous studies explored faculty and student perceptions of HAP difficulty but lacked broad generalizability due to limited replication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To replicate and validate previous findings on the perceived causes of difficulty in Human Anatomy and Physiology.
• To investigate whether student and faculty perceptions of HAP difficulty are consistent across multiple institutions.

Main Methods:

• Survey responses were collected from 466 students across 4 institutions.
• Survey responses were collected from 17 instructors across 15 institutions.
• Data analysis compared current findings with those from prior studies by Michael (2007) and Sturges & Maurer (2013).

Main Results:

• Student perceptions in this study mirrored those in the original research, identifying the nature of the discipline as the primary source of difficulty.
• Faculty perceptions aligned with previous studies, attributing HAP's difficulty to discipline-specific factors.
• Both student and faculty respondents indicated that teaching methods and student learning approaches were less significant contributors to the course's difficulty.

Conclusions:

• The inherent nature of Human Anatomy and Physiology is consistently identified by both students and faculty as the main reason for learning challenges.
• Replication across multiple institutions strengthens the claim that HAP difficulty stems from the discipline itself, rather than instructional or student-related factors.
• Findings support a more confident assertion regarding the intrinsic challenges within the physiology discipline.