A Multimedia Educational Module for Teaching Early Medical Neuroanatomy

As the global burden of neurological disorders continues to rise, physicians' need for a solid understanding of neuroanatomy is becoming more important. Traditional neuroanatomy curricula offer a limited approach to educating a diverse profile of learning styles. In an attempt to incorporate recent literature addressing diverse learning formats, we developed and evaluated two new image-based resources for the neuroscience curriculum.

We created narrated videos demonstrating the brain dissections that students were to perform in the laboratory and quiz-style, postdissection review slides for later self-guided study. These were offered as optional study aids to two classes of preclerkship medical students at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine. Effectiveness was evaluated through examination questions, and a survey was administered to one of the classes to assess usage of and satisfaction with the materials.

Mean scores on the practical examination questions were 83% and 89% for the two classes of students given the resources. Notably, 100% of respondents used the review slides after the laboratory, and more than 99% found them very helpful or extremely helpful for learning relevant concepts.

Our results support the usefulness of these resources as learning tools for neuroanatomy. These resources were meant to augment various traditional resources (textbooks, lecture) to provide a broad range of study options in line with current research. Our experience suggests that similar tools could be developed for application in other visually based content areas of the preclerkship curriculum.