The Physiology undergraduate major in the University of Arizona College of Medicine: past, present, and future

2011 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik J. Henriksen ◽  
Anne E. Atwater ◽  
Nicholas A. Delamere ◽  
William H. Dantzler

The American Physiological Society (APS) and APS Council encourage the teaching of physiology at the undergraduate, graduate, and medical school levels to support the continued prominence of this area of science. One area identified by the APS Council that is of particular importance for the development of future physiologists (the “physiology pipeline”) is the teaching of physiology and physiology-related topics at the undergraduate level. In this article, we describe the historical development and implementation of an undergraduate program offered through the Department of Physiology, a basic science department in the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona, culminating in a Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences degree with a major in Physiology. Moreover, we discuss the current Physiology curriculum offered at our institution and explain how this program prepares our students for successful entry into a variety of postbaccalaureate professional programs, including medical school and numerous other programs in health professions, and in graduate study in the Masters and Doctoral programs in biomedical sciences. Finally, we cover the considerable challenges that we have faced, and continue to face, in developing and sustaining a successful physiology undergraduate major in a college of medicine. We hope that the information provided on the Physiology major offered by the Department of Physiology in the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona will be helpful for individuals at other institutions who may be contemplating the development and implementation of an undergraduate program in Physiology.

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara E. Goodman ◽  
Karen L. Koster ◽  
David L. Swanson

In response to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Association of American Medical Colleges Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians (SFFP) report and a concern for better preparing undergraduates for future doctoral programs in the health professions, the deans of the College of Arts and Sciences and Division of Basic Biomedical Sciences of Sanford School of Medicine of the University of South Dakota formed an ad hoc Premedical Curriculum Review Committee with representatives from the science departments and medical school. The Committee began by reviewing the university's suggested premedical curriculum and matching it to the proposed competencies from the SFFP to document duplications and deficiencies. The proposed changes in the Medical College Admission Test for 2015 were also evaluated. The Committee proposed a stronger premedical curriculum, with the development of some new courses, including an inquiry-based physiology course with team-based learning, to more fully address SFFP competencies. These analyses convinced the university that a new major would best help students achieve the competencies and prepare them for admission exams. Thus, a new Medical Biology major was proposed to the South Dakota Board of Regents and accepted for its initial offering in 2012. The new major has been broadly advertised to future students and is successful as a recruiting tool for the university. This article details the process of evaluating the curriculum and designing the new major, describes some of the difficulties in its implementation, and reviews outcomes from the new major to date.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 360-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Naveed Tavakol ◽  
Cara J. Broshkevitch ◽  
William H. Guilford ◽  
Shayn M. Peirce

In the Undergraduate School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at the University of Virginia (UVa), there are few opportunities for undergraduate students to teach, let alone develop, an introductory course for their major. As two undergraduate engineering students (D. N. Tavakol and C. J. Broshkevitch), we were among the first students to take advantage of a new initiative at UVa SEAS to offer student-led courses. As part of this new program, we designed a 1000-level, 1-credit, pass-fail course entitled Introduction to Research in Regenerative Medicine. During a student’s first year at the University, opportunities to build research skills and gain exposure to topics within the field of the biomedical sciences are relatively rare, so, to fill this gap, we focused our course on teaching primarily freshman undergraduate students how to synthesize and contextualize scientific literature, covering both basic science and clinical applications. At the end of the course, students self-reported increased confidence in reading and discussing scientific papers and review articles. The critical impact of this course lies not only in an early introduction to the popularized field of regenerative medicine, but also encouragement for younger students to participate in research early on and to appreciate the value of interdisciplinary interactions. The teaching model can be extended for implementation of student-taught introductory courses across diverse undergraduate major tracks at an institution.


2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Roland-Lévy

Abstract: The aim of doctoral programs in psychology is to help students become competent psychologists, capable of conducting research and of finding suitable employment. Starting with a brief description of the basic organization of the French university system, this paper presents an overview of how the psychology doctoral training is organized in France. Since October 2000, the requisites and the training of PhD students are the same in all French universities, but what now differs is the openness to other disciplines according to the size and location of the university. Three main groups of doctoral programs are distinguished in this paper. The first group refers to small universities in which the Doctoral Schools are constructed around multidisciplinary seminars that combine various themes, sometimes rather distant from psychology. The second group covers larger universities, with a PhD program that includes psychology as well as other social sciences. The third group contains a few major universities that have doctoral programs that are clearly centered on psychology (clinical, social, and/or cognitive psychology). These descriptions are followed by comments on how PhD programs are presently structured and organized. In the third section, I suggest some concrete ways of improving this doctoral training in order to give French psychologists a more European dimension.


1990 ◽  
Vol 29 (04) ◽  
pp. 386-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Degani ◽  
G. Bortolan

AbstractThe main lines ofthe program designed for the interpretation of ECGs, developed in Padova by LADSEB-CNR with the cooperation of the Medical School of the University of Padova are described. In particular, the strategies used for (i) morphology recognition, (ii) measurement evaluation, and (iii) linguistic decision making are illustrated. The main aspect which discerns this program in comparison with other approaches to computerized electrocardiography is its ability of managing the imprecision in both the measurements and the medical knowledge through the use of fuzzy-set methodologies. So-called possibility distributions are used to represent ill-defined parameters as well as threshold limits for diagnostic criteria. In this way, smooth conclusions are derived when the evidence does not support a crisp decision. The influence of the CSE project on the evolution of the Padova program is illustrated.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (02) ◽  
pp. e255-e266
Author(s):  
Jacob J. Abou-Hanna ◽  
Jonah E. Yousif ◽  
Ariane D. Kaplan ◽  
David C. Musch ◽  
Jonathan D. Trobe

Abstract Background As more information is being packed into medical school curricula, mainstream medical topics legitimately receive more attention than specialty topics such as ophthalmology. However, general practitioners, as gatekeepers of specialty care, must attain competency in ophthalmology. We have investigated whether an online ophthalmology course alone would be noninferior to the same online course plus an in-person clinical elective in providing ophthalmic knowledge. Methods Students at the University of Michigan Medical School voluntarily enrolled in one of two groups: an Online Only group requiring satisfactory completion of an online course entitled “The Eyes Have It” (TEHI) or a Clinical + Online group requiring students to complete a 2-week clinical rotation and the TEHI online course. The outcome metric was the score on an independent 50-question written examination of ophthalmic knowledge. Students also completed a survey assessing confidence in managing ophthalmic problems. Results Twenty students in the Clinical + Online group and 59 students in the Online Only group completed the study. The Clinical + Online group slightly outscored the Online Only group (86.3 vs. 83.0%, p = 0.004). When the two outlier questions were removed from the analysis, there was no difference in mean scores between the two groups (85.8 vs. 85.4, p = 0.069). Students in the Clinical + Online group devoted 80 more hours to the experience than did the students in the Online Only group. The number of hours devoted to the course and interest in ophthalmology were weakly correlated with examination performance. After completion of the experiment, there was no difference in student-reported comfort in dealing with ophthalmic problems between the two groups. Conclusion The examination scores of the students who completed the in-person alone were only slightly inferior to those of the students who completed the in-person clinical elective and the online course. These results suggest that an online course alone may provide a satisfactory ophthalmic knowledge base in a more compact timeframe, an alternative that should have appeal to students who do not intend to pursue a career in ophthalmology.


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