Department of Anatomical Sciences

The Department of Anatomical Sciences offers a master’s degree in anatomy education, which provides rigorous academic training for students pursuing academic careers in the teaching and administration of the clinical anatomical sciences in the professional school environment. There is a compelling requirement in the medical and osteopathic schools for faculty trained to organize, design, teach, assess, and manage modern clinical anatomy curricula supporting undergraduate medical student education. Clinical anatomy, as a subset of classical anatomy, used here, is defined in terms of its four long-standing sub-disciplines: gross anatomy, neuroanatomy, histology and embryology. Clinical anatomy extends the knowledge of classical human anatomy (or morphology) into cause-effect relationships observed in patients with abnormalities involving form and functional attributes that deviate from what is considered as normal.

Curriculum Plan

This program calls for four trimesters of instruction and results in a Master of Science degree in Anatomy Education. Students will re-experience all four anatomical sub-disciplines but within the framework of teaching practice. Thus, given the prior experience in anatomy coursework, the student’s knowledge of anatomy courses (both didactic and laboratory) are covered again, but from an additional aspect – the teaching/learning concepts of anatomy education. Additional coursework provides a foundation in curriculum modeling and design methods, medical imaging, anatomic pathology, surgical anatomy and digital anatomical visualization and interaction methods, including augmented and virtual reality technologies, that prepares the student for advanced curricular design experiences and teaching execution in the modern anatomy lecture hall and laboratory.

At the end of the second trimester of the M.S. program, the student will take a written and practical comprehensive examination. This examination will include a didactic essay and practical questions. A grade of 80% is required to continue to the last trimester.

An additional program requirement is the systematic accumulation of all work produced by the student during his or her matriculation.

Each student will choose a scholarly paper topic in anatomy education to be approved by both the anatomy and education faculty in the student’s master’s committee. Thus, each student’s scholarly paper will be overseen by one faculty member who will be the chairperson of that student’s committee composed of the anatomy education program faculty.

Finally, during the fourth trimester, students will be required to take a leading role, with some faculty guidance, in the design and implementation of the summer prosection seminar that prepares finely-dissected male and female specimens for demonstration in the following year’s first-year class. Additionally, since these expert dissections must be captured in video and images, the participants learn to think in terms of instruction. The M.S. students will test their knowledge of dissection skills and course management by providing expert guidance to the prosectors. Each year, this effort results in useful archives of visualized full-body dissections and assists the students in the forthcoming new first-year class.

Each student’s work will be guided by and supported by anatomy and education faculty that form an M.S. committee that must pass on all student results. This committee will also be responsible for the final approval of the scholarly paper and the student portfolio.

Student attendance in all didactic, laboratory, and academic sessions as defined by the anatomy faculty is required, and all absences must be accounted for and satisfy the anatomy faculty by consensus.

Programs

Master

Anatomy Education, M.S. (55 hrs)