Authentic and career-relevant teaching and assessment approaches in medical human anatomy

Good teaching practice aims to create a constructivist environment for learning where the student is centrally placed, actively engaged, and deep learning is promoted. This can be achieved through an integrated curriculum where the boundaries imposed by traditional discipline areas are transcended and a career-relevant context for the assimilation of content, skills, and processes is achieved. However, current integrated curriculum designs appear better to align some disciplines than others. Human anatomy is an important preclinical discipline that links directly to clinical skills and to postgraduate surgical specializations. Yet through some teaching approaches, preclinical human anatomy can fail to focus on the skills, strategies, values, and principles that link to clinical practice in a meaningful framework. This article describes the design and development of a preclinical human anatomy module within an integrated medical curriculum. The module design not only complements the current integrated curriculum, it does so in a way that fully engages and motivates students and develops a preclinical–clinical learning continuum. This is achieved through the use of authentic assessment tasks and by repositioning assessment within the module to align meaningfully with the ultimate career relevant goals and needs of the student. Student satisfaction, experience, and competencies in anatomy were then assessed. Human anatomy is a discipline area potentially widely underserved by current integrated curricular design and assessment practices. The teaching and learning strategies applied here have lead to demonstrated improvement in the understanding and clinical application of anatomy and an enhanced student learning experience