that anyone slacks off: “No one wants to let the team down.” And because they’re studying harder for the team, the scores on their written exams, which they take individually, have been rising. Lectures play a smaller role than they did in the past–but likely a more exciting one because, when possible, they are based on real-life examples. When orthopaedist Brian J. Sennett, M.D. ’88, discusses sports medicine, he begins with a video of Tom Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback, smashing his knee at the start of the 2008 season. Sennett asks what could be injured, explains the structure of a healthy knee, and then shows what happened to Brady (he tore both his anterior cruciate ligament and his medial collateral ligament). “We’re not teaching them to be sports medicine people,” says Rubinstein, adding, “but if that grabs their interest, that’s great.” Instead, he emphasizes, “We’re showing them that there’s a reason that we’re teaching anatomy.” Technology is making the lectures interactive. Speakers may use “smart boards,” slides on which they write and draw, which the students see developing
Jerome Molleston, Lucie Guo, and Ryan Jamiolkowski observe as Ankona Ghosh, then a teaching assistant, shares information. Ghosh is now an intern in otolaryngology at HUP.
and the speaker could address the various answers. Technology is also making cadavers more life-like. The Department of Orthopaedic Surgery is constructing a human fresh-tissue laboratory where cadavers
Penn students take practical exams – on tagged body structures – as a team. “No matter how hard we make the QUESTIONS, they ace this exam.” in real time. The slides are then posted on the “virtual curriculum,” where students can download the images and make notes on their own copies. One innovation last fall was the use of remote-control clickers, which enabled students to answer questions; the results were tabulated instantly,
will be “lightly fixed” so that residents can be trained on more normal-appearing bodies. Rubinstein looks forward to having the first-year students rotate through the lab. He also foresees expanded use of three-dimensional imaging. At present, it
is used sparingly, as when the radiology residents give the lectures. Currently, students view structures in cross-sections and various planes, “but they tend not to reconstruct them into 3-D images,” he says. “I’d really like to see us doing that. It would be a great advance on how we teach gross anatomy, and students could put it on their own computers and work on it themselves.” Rubinstein considers what technology has done to gross anatomy: “When I was a medical student, they said that anatomy was going away, that soon it would all be biochemistry. Then molecular biology came, and they said it would all be molecular biology. But it’s not. Because of all the imaging, you don’t need to do surgical interventions to see what’s going on inside someone. It has actually ended up being more anatomy.” Marshall A. Ledger, Ph.D., is former editor of Penn Medicine and Trust, the magazine of The Pew Charitable Trusts.
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