This article explores an innovative educational approach using a metabolic board designed to enhance understanding of muscle metabolism across three endurance training zones: Z1 (light intensity), Z2 (moderate intensity), and Z3 (intense/severe intensity). The aerobic threshold marks the transition from light to moderate domains and the anaerobic…

This study revises and enhances a guided inquiry activity designed to introduce undergraduate and high school students to the physiological concepts of exercise fatigue during a 400-meter dash. This activity has been employed since 2016 in entry-level human physiology courses at the University of Minnesota and across 30 high schools. Using…

The distribution of pulmonary blood flow is uneven and can be described as a three-zone model, the West zones: zone 1 occurs whenever alveolar pressure exceeds arterial pressure; zone 2 when the arterial pressure is greater than alveolar but the alveolar pressure exceeds the venous pressure; and finally zone 3 when both arterial and venous…

Despite recognising momentary challenges while learning, collaborative groups do not necessarily regulate and adapt their learning process according to the demands. Various online measures have recently been explored to unobtrusively study engagement and adaptation in collaborative learning (CL), as it occurs in the classroom. For example,…

Virtual Reality (VR) involves the coupling of visual communication hardware and software. The technology is capable of offering transformative educational practice and is increasingly being adopted within the biochemistry domain to better understand complex biochemical processes. This article documents a pilot study for the efficacy of VR in…

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent policies (e.g., social distancing, travel restrictions) challenged both organizers for and attendees of programs typically held in person. Many scientific training programs quickly adapted to virtual formats by incorporating digital assets developed for virtual learning and remote social engagement. At the…

Mastering the complexity of the nervous system is essential for education programs in physiology, anatomy, and neuroscience. Students often struggle when learning somatosensory pathways, which convey information from sensory neurons to the somatosensory cortex in the brain. Active learning activities incorporating physical models have been shown…

Understanding complex physiological processes is a cornerstone of medical education, and one such fundamental concept is the regulation of the glomerular filtration rate (GFR) by Starling forces. Therefore, developing a physiologically sound educational model to demonstrate these forces can significantly enhance the learning experience for…

The increasing popularity of mobile devices as alternative tools for learning has led to the adoption of virtual laboratory simulation (VLab) to enhance practical learning experiences. This paper introduces an interactive mobile learning application designed to facilitate medical students in learning ear anatomy using a three-dimensional model.…

Academic help-seeking can allow students to moderate their anxiety in difficult academic contexts, but students often shy away from asking for needed assistance. Muddiest point assignments in a hybrid human anatomy and physiology (A&P) course can address student struggles with academic help-seeking by making it an activity in which all…

Many publications describe use of ultrasound imaging in teaching of clinical courses, primarily integrated with clinical applications. More recently there have been increasing numbers of papers describing ultrasound as a tool primarily for teaching basic anatomy and physiology concepts rather than clinical applications. Of these, many have…

Studies document difficulties undergraduate pre-nursing and allied health students face when learning human anatomy and physiology (A&P) course content. A comprehensive synthesis exploring the teaching practices within the course and how those practices are evaluated is warranted. This scoping literature review identified 78 journal articles…

Physiological measures associated with emotional expressions have been used extensively in lab- and, more recently, digital-learning settings. However, the portable and ubiquitous nature of hardware that measures these physiological features makes them particularly useful in situations where you do not want the hardware to be too obtrusive, like…

In this article we analyze the classic Hodgkin and Keynes 1955 paper describing investigations of the independence principle, with the expectation that there is much students and educators can learn from such exercises, most notably how the authors applied their diverse skill set to tackling the numerous obstacles that the study presented. The…

Dramatization, a teaching method where each student acts out or mimics a cell or body parts while the entire group represents the physiological process was adapted to produce original teaching videos paired with a pretest that activates memory and a posttest to prevent misconceptions. Three physiology instructors collaborated on Zoom to create six…