Creation and Use of Medical Histology‐Pathology Electronic Flashcards
Karen E. Pinder, Jeremy Dick · The FASEB Journal · 2019
To facilitate medical students' learning of the newly integrated histology‐pathology course components of the undergraduate medical school curriculum at the University of British Columbia (UBC), we created electronic study flashcards. Modelled after the histopathology curriculum, the flashcards are designed to utilize spaced repetition learning and to facilitate the recall of normal histologic structures and associated prototypical pathological changes in tissues and/or cells. Nearly nine hundred Anki software‐based flashcards were created, with content focussed on annotated histology and pathology virtual slides. Distributed to and used by students online, each flashcard opens with arrows indicating unlabelled structures and asks students to “name the following” prior to clicking on “show answer” to confirm answers. There are also second‐order flashcards prompting students to recall relevant aspects related to the unidentified tissues. Survey results demonstrate that the flashcards provide an effective means of augmenting students' learning and developing long‐term understanding and recall: 89% of responding medical students agreed that the flashcards are helpful for improving knowledge and exam preparation. This UBC histology‐pathology initiative is engaging and efficacious in enhancing student learning and is being used to promote learning in two core foundational medical sciences (histology and pathology). The software and its uses can easily be extrapolated to all of the foundational sciences and therefore it will be of interest to students and faculty in any of the medical and allied fields. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .