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This was my experience with Neuro-anatomy delivered for
the first time in the summer of 2011-2012 which I guess
we can call the 'Chiropractic Experience'.
This Neuro-anatomy unit was one that I had just re-designed because we had
completely reorganised Anatomy. It had gone from three years to two years of Anatomy
and so I spent a lot of time redesigning the unit
and I ran it for the first time in Session 2 in 2011
and then I had to go straight into Session 3 the same year
with the intensive mode version of the same unit
and that ran through
from the 10th January to February 14th.
It was run over six weeks
in comparison to the usual thirteen weeks.
Because of the time constraints I had around design and also because my
objective was actually to compare
these two modes of delivery of the same unit,
the structure of the unit was left completely unchanged. So the content was the same,
the outcomes were the same, the teachers were the same
and the teaching format was exactly the same.
It consisted of lectures, now, in the case of lectures for
the Session 2 students,
they had three hours of lecture a week,
over the thirteen weeks
and all of these were recorded, at that time it was on Blackboard iLecture,
and then I just made those same lectures available for Session 3.
So it was the exact lectures that they got,
the only difference is that because it was over a reduced period of time
they had to do six hours of lectures a week
and there was one when
we were doing the brainstem when in fact they had to do nine hours of lectures in one week,
so it was lot of lectures for them to get through.
And then with the practicals and the tutorials I had a manual
that I had written which
was used in Session 2 and they used exactly the same manual in Session 3.
The practicals consists of prosections in the wet lab,
this is where you take the cadaver and
cut it into sections and then you do a dissection of that section
for specific purposes of teaching,
so they learn also, they don't produce the prosection, they learn off them,
neurological models and there's also radiology, so x-ray's, MRI's, CAT scans,
these sorts of things.
All of that is done at ASAM, I'll tell you about that a bit later.
The tutorials consisted of sessions where they go through
living and functional neuroanatomy,
important for chiropractic because they're working on the surface of the body
and a moving body
and also case studies.
For the Session 3 students the practicals and tutorial sessions
were run on campus one day a week
and this is a
picture of the wet lab, usually you would see gurneys out
and you would see prosections on them but we can't photograph
the prosections,
but that is the actual wet lab.
What they would have is four hours a weeks of practicals at the
Australian School of Advanced Medicine
and in that wet lab,
and the ratio of students to tutors there was thirteen students to a tutor,
which was a little more than was for Session 2 which was a
ten to one ratio
and so they would do that in the morning and then in the afternoon they would do two hours a week
of tutorials on campus, not in the wet lab,
and there the ratio of students to tutors was twenty to one
as opposed to for Session 2 it was slightly higher, twenty three to one.
So this is in contrast to what was happening in Session 2, where they would do
two hours of practical, not four, once a week
and do one hour tutorial, not two,
once a week.
So these are the results of the study.
We first of all
compared the demographics of the two groups.
This group over here is in fact the Session 2 group with
the traditional mode of delivery
and this SS stands for Summer Session, this is the Session 3
Intensive Mode Delivery.
When you compared
the demographics there were some differences,
when it came to the percentage of domestic students we had
a higher percentage in the Session 3.
We looked at students with previous degrees, there was a higher percentage
in the Session 2,
and that was because we have Masters qualifying students --
it's now changed but we would have Masters qualifying students coming through
and they'd come through
in Session 2.
This was important, the grade point averages.
Again we saw a difference
between the two groups
and one could say that
the Session 3 students were
academically weaker than
the Session 2
and because of this difference in the grade point averages we did
adjust our
results for this difference.
I will show you the results on the next slide.
The other difference is down here and it's to be expected.
This is the hours that the students spent in self-directed-study
and you can see that the Session 3 spent a lot more time,
but of course they were doubling up on everything so they would spend more time
studying on their own.
This is the primary results that we had,
and you can see on the far right column these are the
adjusted key values for
the GPA differences.
These results were interesting, so we start off here, this is the self-rated -
they rated their own level of knowledge and understanding
on the scale from one, or I think it was zero to a hundred
and what we found was there was no difference in how they rated themselves between the two groups.
They both had the same idea
of how much knowledge they had
from the unit.
Of course these were given out at the end of the unit.
Then the FSNG, this is the standing numerical grades,
the final grades and you can clearly see here that the Session 3 students
did not do as well as the Session 2 students
and that was even after adjusting for that GPA difference, it was still significant.
When we looked at the distribution
this is, -
so here we've got on the Y axis the percentage of students
and on the X axis the grade distribution.
The students that were in Session 2 are in the dark columns
and those in Session 3 are in the light columns.
What we found was our failure rates were higher
in Session 3.
We found that a percentage of students that
attained a Credit was a lot lower.
Of what we did find that was interesting was in fact -
this was not significant
this difference here with Passes -
and what was interesting is
with the upper ends of the grade distribution there were no differences when it came to
Distinctions and High Distinctions, there was no difference
between the two groups.
So the other thing we did was we handed out a questionnaire
where we asked them to rate the course
and therefore we could
estimate the level of satisfaction
overall with the course and then also with various components of the course.
What we found here interestingly was that there was
no difference between the two groups. Overall the students were
equally satisfied with the course.
So here we've got the level of satisfaction, this was on
the Likert scale and this is the satisfaction categories.
The Session 2's are the triangles,
SD, the standard deviation and the intensive mode is the circles
and there was no difference.
The only difference was practicals
and the interesting thing there was that
the students in the Session 3's enjoyed, were more satisfied with
the practicals
compared to Session 2 and they were doing the four hours in one go.
We also, on the questionnaire, asked for student feedback and this was
the student feedback
from the Session 3
and it was the same thing over and over. They were saying the same thing all the time.
They were saying basically there is too much content
in this course for Summer School.
They did enjoy the lectures, the lectures were very engaging,
some weeks were difficult to keep up, particularly those nine hours.
Lectures were engaging, extremely interesting, enjoyed the teaching style,
down here the tutors were excellent, so they seem to be quite happy with the way they were taught.
But, it comes back to every time they were saying it took a long time
to get through the lectures.
This was interesting -- with face to face lectures --
considering that students anyway don't come to your lectures.
There seems to have been too much content and not enough time.
So they were basically battling with the level of content that they had to
get through
over the short period of time.
So if I was to summarise my chiropractic experience
and looking specifically at the Session 3 cohort,
they were academically a weaker group.
They spent more than double
the amount of time a week in self study so they were really putting the effort in.
They felt that they knew the subject the same as extent as the Session 2's,
but they did not do as well as the Session 2's
even after adjusting for the Grade Point Averages.
But they enjoyed the unit to the same extent,
and in some cases even more than the Session 2 students,
so it seems really to be a case of this huge content that they were trying
to deal with
and the dilemma for me is that you have to maintain the same standard
as the traditional mode.
You can't cut down the content, you can't make it a lighter unit because
it's called the same thing,
and yet how do you deal with this overwhelming problem the students seem to have.