In pursuit of a holistic learning environment: the impact of music in the medical physiology classroom.

A holistic learning environment is one that nurtures all aspects of students' learning. The environment is safe, supportive, and provides opportunities to help students deal with nonacademic as well as academic factors that impact their learning. Creation of such an environment requires the establishment of a supportive learning community. For a variety of reasons, establishing such a learning community of first-year medical students can be challenging. This communication presents one approach to meeting this challenge in a medical school Human Physiology course. Steps were taken at the beginning of the course to create the community, and activities designed to reinforce these efforts were incorporated into the course as it progressed. Two pilot studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that providing students with a participatory music experience may help to promote a holistic learning environment by helping them restore a sense of balance to their emotional well-being as well as reinforce a sense of community in the classroom. Student response to these activities indicated that these efforts provided emotional support during stressful periods during the quarter, helped promote a feeling of safety within the environment, and re-energized the class during long class sessions. This project illustrates that each instructor, within the confines of his/her own classroom, can make a significant contribution to achieving a holistic learning environment for his/her students.

Helping students make sense of physiological mechanisms: the "view from the inside".

Students often view physiological mechanisms in descriptive terms from a perspective that does not help them recognize causal relationships. The "view from the inside" is a technique that helps students focus on causal relationships from the "viewpoint" of a reporter standing inside of the system. Qualitative data indicate that the technique helps students to recognize the applicability of general models in physiology, make sense of difficult physiological mechanisms, and develop learning strategies that they apply to other disciplines. The technique is also useful in helping students recognize conceptual or reasoning difficulties in their mental models (misconceptions).

Enhancing active learning in the student laboratory.

We previously examined how three approaches to directing students in a laboratory setting impacted their ability to repair a faulty mental model in respiratory physiology (Modell, HI, Michael JA, Adamson T, Goldberg J, Horwitz BA, Bruce DS, Hudson ML, Whitescarver SA, and Williams S. Adv Physiol Educ 23: 82-90, 2000). This study addresses issues raised by the results of that work. In one group, a written protocol directed students to predict what would happen to frequency and depth of breathing during exercise on a bicycle ergometer, run the experiment, and compare their results to their predictions ("predictor without verification"). In a "predictor with verification" group, students followed the same written protocol but were also required to show the instructor their predictions before running the experiment. Students in a third group reported their predictions verbally to an instructor immediately before exercise and reviewed their results with that instructor immediately after exercise ("instructor intervention group"). Results of this study were consistent with our earlier work. The predictor with verification and predictor without verification protocols yielded similar results. The instructor intervention protocol yielded higher success rates in repairing students' mental models. We subsequently assessed the efficacy of a prediction period at the beginning of the lab session and a wrap-up period at the end to compare predictions and results. This predict and wrap-up protocol was more effective than the predictor without verification protocol, but it was not as effective as the instructor intervention protocol. Although these results may reflect multiple factors impacting learning in the student laboratory, we believe that a major factor is a mismatch between students' approaches to learning and the intended learning outcomes of the experience.

Undergraduates' understanding of cardiovascular phenomena.

Undergraduates students in 12 courses at 8 different institutions were surveyed to determine the prevalence of 13 different misconceptions (conceptual difficulties) about cardiovascular function. The prevalence of these misconceptions ranged from 20 to 81% and, for each misconception, was consistent across the different student populations. We also obtained explanations for the students' answers either as free responses or with follow-up multiple-choice questions. These results suggest that students have a number of underlying conceptual difficulties about cardiovascular phenomena. One possible source of some misconceptions is the students' inability to apply simple general models to specific cardiovascular phenomena. Some implications of these results for teachers of physiology are discussed.