Say It. Take It Apart. Learn It.

How we rebuilt the terminology tools in Anatomy & Physiology, 12th Edition.

An A&P course is partly a language course.

Okay, it's a huge language course.

Our students encounter hundreds of unfamiliar terms, many of them long, difficult to pronounce, and constructed from word parts they've never seen before. And we're asking students to learn all that new language while simultaneously learning some pretty challenging concepts.

That's why Anatomy & Physiology has long provided terminology-learning tools that you may not find—or may not find in the same depth—in other A&P textbooks.

For our new 12th Edition, we decided those tools deserved a major tune-up.

And that's how Frank got himself into trouble.

A word list with a job

At the beginning of each chapter, we provide a chapter word list.

It's comprehensive. The list gathers all the boldface terms from the chapter narrative, along with an occasional italicized term when we think it's useful to include it.

That gives students one convenient place to preview the important language of the chapter.

But these aren't intended simply as "vocabulary words that might be on the test."

I've previously explained the idea in Word Lists Help Students Build Their Mental Lexicons.

One useful way to prepare for reading an A&P chapter is to scan its terminology before digging into the narrative. That gives the reader a chance to start becoming familiar with the words before trying to understand the concepts they represent.

Learning research gives us good reason to think about new vocabulary this way. Becoming familiar with a word involves developing connections among how the word is written, how it sounds, and what it means.

That's one reason I don't want students meeting carbaminohemoglobin cold in the middle of an already complicated explanation of blood-gas transport.

Give the poor student a fighting chance.

Say it

Our chapter word lists include a simple phonetic pronunciation guide for each term, along with an embedded hint instructing the reader how to use it.

The comprehensive Glossary does, too.

That lets students practice saying a term before encountering it within a sentence that's already asking them to understand some new anatomical or physiological idea.

Yes, I actually encourage students to say the terms aloud.

I've been beating that drum for years—in Word Lists Help Students Build Their Mental Lexicons, in The A&P Professor podcast Episode 20, Reading A&P Terms Out Loud Helps Reading Comprehension, and again in Episode 145, A Tongue Twister's Guide to Mastering Anatomy Pronunciation.

There is learning science behind my nagging.

Research on what's called the production effect has repeatedly found that saying words aloud can improve later memory for them compared with simply reading them silently. One leading explanation is that producing the word makes its memory more distinctive.

Does that mean saying carbaminohemoglobin three times will suddenly make you understand blood-gas transport?

Nope.

But the term can begin to "sound right" in the learner's mental lexicon. When it later appears in a sentence, the reader has one less completely unfamiliar thing to wrestle with while trying to understand the actual A&P.

That can be especially helpful for readers who aren't yet very comfortable predicting the pronunciation of unfamiliar English words.

Which, when you think about English pronunciation, could be just about anybody.

Why not put the pronunciation right in the sentence?

Some textbooks put pronunciation guides immediately after a term the first time it appears in the narrative.

There's an obvious advantage to that: the pronunciation is sitting right there when the reader needs it.

But we chose a different approach.

A beginning A&P learner is already trying to hold unfamiliar structures, processes, relationships, and vocabulary in mind while making sense of a sentence. Dropping a phonetic pronunciation guide into the middle adds another piece to process—and interrupts the flow of an explanation that may already be challenging.

We'd rather give students the pronunciation before they read.

And if they need it again, it's waiting in the chapter word list or Glossary.

I should be clear that I don't know of research directly comparing our approach with inline pronunciation guides in A&P textbooks. That's our application of what we know about reading, vocabulary learning, memory, cognitive load, and our experience watching beginning A&P students wrestle with unfamiliar terminology.

Take it apart

Pronunciation is only part of the job.

Most A&P instructors I know are constantly taking terms apart for their students.

Hyper- means above.

Hypo- means below.

Cardi- refers to the heart.

-itis means inflammation.

We do this almost without thinking.

Why?

Because once students start recognizing commonly used roots, prefixes, and suffixes, an intimidating scientific term becomes a lot less intimidating.

Our chapter word lists support that approach by showing useful word parts and their basic translations. Students can skim them while previewing a chapter.

Our Glossary provides those same kinds of clues when students look up terms later.

I've discussed this strategy before in Word Parts Help Students Master the Language of Science and Handy Supplement Helps Students Master the Lingo of A&P.

Word parts can act as little mnemonic clues. They may help students remember the spelling and meaning of a term.

More importantly, each familiar word part becomes another tool students can carry forward. When they encounter a term they've never seen before, they can often begin taking it apart and making an educated guess about what it means.

That's a skill they'll keep using in later courses and eventually in clinical settings.

And isn't that exactly what we A&P professors already do?

We point out word parts during lectures and discussions. We explain them in handouts and assignments. We keep reminding students that this bit means one thing and that bit means another.

The difference is that our chapter word lists give students a complete, consistent resource that's always handy.

Research on morphological learning—learning to recognize and use meaningful word parts—supports its usefulness in building vocabulary. A 2023 study with college learners, for example, found that explicit morphological training improved receptive academic vocabulary learning. The National Library of Medicine likewise teaches medical terminology by having learners identify prefixes, roots, suffixes, and other components and use them to work out meanings of unfamiliar medical terms.

Anatomy-specific research has also found benefits from explicitly teaching Latin and Greek etymologies alongside anatomical terminology

No, learning a pile of Greek and Latin roots isn't a magic shortcut to mastering A&P. Research with undergraduate A&P students has found only a weak relationship between their existing knowledge of Greek and Latin roots and overall course performance.

That's fine.

We're not trying to turn the chapter word lists into a Latin course.

We're giving students another tool for figuring things out.

Names change, too

Another part of our terminology cleanup involved continuing a transition we've been making for years: moving farther away from eponyms as our preferred anatomical terms.

An eponym names something after a person. Islets of Langerhans, haversian canal, and fallopian tube are familiar examples.

Eponyms remain deeply embedded in clinical language, and our students are going to encounter many of them. So we don't pretend they don't exist.

But international efforts to standardize anatomical terminology have long favored standardized descriptive terminology rather than eponyms as the preferred names for structures. Clinical usage has not always moved at the same speed.

So our general approach is practical: teach students the currently preferred descriptive terminology while helping them recognize important alternate terms they'll still hear and read elsewhere.

I've written about some of this before in What's Up with Eponyms in A&P? Part 1 and What's Up with Eponyms in A&P? Part 2.

And yes, at the end of Part 2 I promised a Part 3.

In 2018.

I really ought to get back to that.

Especially because A&P faculty still have some pretty lively disagreements over what we should do with eponyms. We had a few of those discussions within the Patton Team, too.

Or what passes for lively disagreement among us.

More about that another time.

Then Frank got the job

All of this sounds fairly straightforward until you realize how many terms we're talking about.

And how many pieces each entry has.

Which term should be preferred?

Which alternate terms should remain?

Is the pronunciation accurate?

Is it consistent with similar terms elsewhere in the book?

Are the syllables and word parts divided appropriately?

Are their translations useful to a beginning learner?

Does the formatting make the entry easier to understand?

Now multiply that by an entire A&P textbook.

Then remember that our revision team included four authors, at least three editors, and a collection of reviewers, copyeditors, proofreaders, compositors, and others.

Having all of us independently "fix" terminology seemed like an excellent recipe for making it less consistent.

Clearly, we needed one person to wrangle the whole thing.

Author Frank Bell, our in-house terminology guru, seemed like the obvious choice.

I vaguely recall that Frank was absent from the weekly Patton Team meeting when his name came up as the perfect person for the job.

Pure coincidence, I'm sure.

When the news reached him, Frank didn't hesitate.

Much.

A global terminology cleanup

Frank took on a global review of the terminology resources for the entire book.

And it turned out to be a much bigger job than any of us anticipated.

Besides reviewing the terminology itself against current usage and authoritative sources, he went through the pronunciation guides, word parts, translations, and formatting.

Occasionally, Frank would come back to me with a question such as, "Why did you do it this way?"

That's always a fun question for an author who has been revising a textbook for decades.

Sometimes I could explain the original thinking.

Sometimes the answer was probably some variation of, "Well, I'm sure there was a reason."

With that background, Frank could decide whether the original approach still made sense—or whether he had found a better one.

Once Frank completed his review, the other authors incorporated his terminology changes throughout the chapters and other elements being revised.

Then editors checked us.

Then copyeditors checked us.

Then proofreaders checked us.

And, as always, despite all that checking, I'm sure somebody will eventually find something we missed. That's what happens in a project containing thousands upon thousands of tiny details.

But this is by far the most systematic and consistent terminology review we've ever done.

And there's the Glossary

As I mentioned in the first post of this series, The A&P Textbook You May Have Overlooked, we've moved our large Glossary from the back of the printed textbook to the Evolve Student Resources.

That helped us make the physical book noticeably shorter without taking this resource away from students.

The Glossary is more comprehensive than the chapter word lists. It includes all the boldface and italicized terms from the text narrative, plus some additional terms that students encounter only in figures or tables.

And it reinforces the same learning tools students encounter in the chapter word lists.

How do I say this term?

What useful word parts can I recognize?

What do those parts mean?

So a student can preview terminology in the chapter word list, encounter it while learning the chapter's A&P, and return to it later in the Glossary.

Same language. Same system. Same tools.

Our best terminology tools yet

When Frank finally emerged from beneath the mountain of terminology, the 12th Edition had the most carefully reviewed and internally consistent collection of A&P terms, simple pronunciations, and useful word-part translations we've ever produced.

Having looked at the terminology resources available in the other A&P textbooks we examined, I suppose I could claim that ours is the best A&P terminology collection in the universe.

I'm not going to claim that.

But I think I could.

What I will claim is that we worked very hard to make these resources accurate, consistent, easy to use, and genuinely useful to beginning A&P learners.

Terminology isn't something we add around the edges of an A&P course.

It's the language students need to learn the course.

So we think it's worth getting the words right.

If you'd like to explore these terminology resources yourself, request a free instructor review copy of the new 12th Edition of Anatomy & Physiology.

High-school A&P instructors: These updates also apply to Anthony’s Textbook of Anatomy & Physiology, 22nd Edition, the high-school edition of the two-semester Patton A&P program.

Why We Flipped the Reproductive Story

Rethinking the traditional male-first organization of A&P.

In my earlier post, The A&P Textbook You May Have Overlooked, I mentioned that in our revised 12th Edition of Anatomy & Physiology, we turned our story of the human reproductive systems inside out, upside down, and flipped around.

Here's what I meant.

In the 11th Edition of Anatomy & Physiology, our organization probably looked very familiar:

Chapter 45: Male Reproductive System
Chapter 46: Female Reproductive System
Chapter 47: Growth, Development, & Aging

That's also the traditional organization in many A&P textbooks and curriculum documents. The currently posted HAPS A&P Learning Outcomes, for example, list male reproductive anatomy before female reproductive anatomy, followed by spermatogenesis before oogenesis. Of course, the HAPS Learning Outcomes are not intended to prescribe a teaching sequence.

The same male-first convention remains in the other major A&P textbooks we examined. Current examples from Saladin, Tortora, and OpenStax all begin their reproductive-system coverage with the male system before moving to the female system.

So why did we decide to change it?

We didn’t simply reverse the old chapters. We changed the way the reproductive story is organized.

The old story made sense

We had a legitimate pedagogical reason for our traditional organization.

We regarded the typical male genital system as the structurally simpler of the two systems. Starting there allowed students to establish some basic structural principles before moving to the more complex typical female system.

And because the story then moved toward fertilization, gestation, and birth, having the female system immediately precede that content also seemed logical.

I still think those are reasonable arguments.

But we eventually had to ask ourselves how much of our reasoning came from pedagogy and how much came from that very powerful force in education:

That's the way we've always done it.

We were also hearing concerns from professors, students, and others that routinely starting with the male system can carry an unintended message. It can suggest that male anatomy is the starting point or standard, with female anatomy following as a variation on that story.

That certainly wasn't the message we intended.

But intent isn't the only thing that matters in telling a story.

We weren't the only ones thinking about this

Once we began looking into the issue, we found that scholars had been raising related concerns for decades.

In 1992, Susan Lawrence and Kae Bendixen examined 31 anatomy textbooks used by U.S. medical students from 1890 through 1989. They found that illustrations, vocabulary, and syntax commonly presented male anatomy as the norm or standard against which female anatomy was compared.

Susan Morgan and colleagues later examined contemporary anatomy textbooks. They likewise found problems with equal representation of female and male anatomy. Interestingly, their research with medical students suggested that many students did not recognize some of these issues themselves.

Then, in 2021, Katherine Ray King, Linda Fuselier, and Harshini Sirvisetty analyzed four widely adopted undergraduate nursing A&P textbooks. They specifically described a "male-first" perspective in which males occupy the central position and female and nonbinary identities become the "other."

Elizabeth Whitaker and Raffaella Baccolini looked at a different setting—Italian middle-school science resources—but found the same ordering convention. All the books they examined followed a male-first sequence when presenting reproductive topics.

These studies don't all examine the same learners, the same kinds of textbooks, or the same issue in exactly the same way. So I don't want to stretch their findings beyond what they actually show.

But they did reassure us that we hadn't rocketed off to an entirely new planet by questioning the traditional sequence.

There really is something worth thinking about here.

Just flipping the chapters wasn't enough

The obvious solution would be easy:

Chapter 45: Female Reproductive System
Chapter 46: Male Reproductive System

Done!

Except we didn't like that solution very much.

It would still make one system the starting point and the other the follow-up. It wouldn't really rethink the story. It would simply reverse it.

We wanted to organize these topics around something other than male versus female.

And we had another important consideration.

As I've explained previously [Chunking Chapters—By The Numbers], we've deliberately divided our A&P story into relatively small chapters. In our comparisons, our chapters average about half the size of those in many other undergraduate A&P textbooks.

We think that kind of chunking makes a huge body of unfamiliar information more manageable for beginning learners.

So we wanted to keep three relatively small chapters. We didn't want to solve one problem by creating one or two monster chapters on reproduction.

Yeah, it took us a while to figure this out.

The Patton Team discussed and debated the reorganization for several years. A change this large unravels all kinds of other things in a textbook—figures, tables, review questions, online resources, cross-references, and much more. And the limited amount of time between editions is a very real factor in deciding whether a major change can actually be accomplished.

We also weren't yet sure where our A&P colleagues and students wanted this story to go.

Eventually, two familiar ideas came together and gave us our solution.

Structure first, then function

When we've divided larger chapters into smaller chunks in previous editions, one approach that has often worked well is a structure/function split.

We aren't alone in finding that sequence useful. Even within the larger chapters of other A&P textbooks, it's common to establish important anatomical structures before moving more deeply into the physiological processes involving them. You can see versions of that pattern throughout A&P—for example, respiratory anatomy before pulmonary ventilation, or kidney anatomy and histology before renal physiology.

Of course, anatomy and physiology ultimately belong together. Many of us quite rightly say that we integrate structure and function in our teaching.

But to integrate things, students first need some things to integrate.

At some point, a beginning learner needs a reasonably clear picture of the structures involved and a reasonably clear picture of the processes involving those structures. Then the connections between them can become richer and more useful.

That familiar structure/function approach gave us one part of our solution.

The other part came from terminology.

Genital or reproductive?

We had been noticing increasing use of genital system, especially when the emphasis is on anatomy.

And that term has a solid anatomical pedigree.

Terminologia Anatomica, the international standard for human anatomical terminology, calls its Chapter 9 Genital Systems. It lists the Female Genital System first, followed by the Male Genital System. It also recognizes female reproductive system and male reproductive system as synonymous terminology.

Now, Terminologia Anatomica is a terminology standard, not an A&P curriculum guide. Its ordering doesn't tell us how to teach.

But the terminology helped us see an elegant way forward.

We didn't want to abandon reproductive system, either. That's the familiar term that our students will continue to encounter in courses, learning outcomes, clinical settings, and other textbooks.

So we explain that the terms can be used interchangeably. But in our own narrative, we tend to use genital when we're emphasizing the structures and their basic functional anatomy. We tend to use reproductive when we're emphasizing the physiological processes involved in producing offspring.

And there it was.

Instead of dividing our chapters into male and female, we could divide them largely into structure and reproductive function.

And within each part of the story, we could use a female-first sequence.

It’s not just a claim: the new chapter actually begins the anatomical story with the typical female system.

The goal wasn't to declare female anatomy the new "default." The more important change was getting rid of sex as the dividing line between the chapters.

Act 1: Genital Systems

Our new Chapter 45: Genital Systems establishes the structures and their basic functional anatomy.

And yes, we flip the traditional sequence. We begin with the typical female genital system.

Here's the first half of the program:

Chapter 45: Genital Systems—Typical Female Genital System

• Overview of the Genital Systems

• Overview of the Typical Female Genital System

• Ovaries

• Uterine Tubes

• Uterus

• Vagina

• Vulva

• Breasts

Within those sections, students explore location, structure, microscopic anatomy where appropriate, and basic functions.

Then we move to:

Chapter 45: Genital Systems—Typical Male Genital System

• Overview of the Typical Male Genital System

• Testes

• Epididymis

• Vas Deferens

• Ejaculatory Ducts

• Urethra

• Accessory Genital Glands

• Supporting Structures

• Composition and Course of Seminal Fluid

• Differentiation and Development of Genital Organs

Notice that we haven't simply reversed two chapter titles.

We've brought the anatomy of both genital systems together into one chapter.

That lets students encounter them as related variations on the same basic biological story. It also makes their similarities, differences, and developmental relationships easier to connect.

Act 2: Reproduction

Once students know the structures and their basic functions, Chapter 46: Reproduction moves more deeply into reproductive physiology.

Again, we begin with female functions.

Here's that program:

Chapter 46: Reproduction

• Overview of Reproductive Physiology

• Female Reproductive Physiology

• Female Reproductive Cycles

  • Recurring Cycles

  • Control of Female Reproductive Cycles

  • Importance of Female Reproductive Cycles

  • Menarche and Menopause

• Male Reproductive Physiology

  • Hormonal Regulation

  • Male Fertility

• Sex Cell Production and Fertilization

  • Production of Sex Cells

  • Fertilization

  • Infertility

I really like the way this story now unfolds.

We first explore female reproductive physiology and its recurring cycles. Then we explore male reproductive physiology.

Finally, those two threads come together as we explore sex-cell production, fertilization, and infertility.

Instead of telling two mostly separate stories called Male and Female, we are telling one reproductive story involving both systems.

Act 3: The whole life cycle

After fertilization, the story flows naturally into Chapter 47: Growth, Development, & Aging.

Here's the program:

Chapter 47: Growth, Development, & Aging

• Prenatal Period

  • Cleavage and Implantation

  • Placenta

  • Periods of Development

  • Stem Cells

  • Formation of Primary Germ Layers

  • Histogenesis and Organogenesis

• Birth

  • Stages of Labor

  • Multiple Births

• Postnatal Period

  • Growth, Development, and Aging

  • Infancy

  • Childhood

  • Adolescence and Adulthood

  • Older Adulthood

• Aging

  • Mechanisms of Aging

  • Effects of Aging

• Causes of Death

So our three-chapter story now has a pretty simple logic:

Chapter 45: What are the genital structures, and what do they do?

Chapter 46: How do the two systems function in reproduction?

Chapter 47: How do offspring develop, grow, and age?

To us, that turned out to be a cleaner and more logical story than the one we started with.

It preserves our short-chapter approach. It uses a familiar structure/function progression. It keeps all the traditional reproductive content that A&P instructors expect. And it no longer requires maleness to be the automatic starting point for telling the story.

But do I have to reorganize my course?

Nope.

We believe this new organization responds to perspectives we're increasingly hearing from our colleagues and students while retaining the familiar content expected in an undergraduate A&P course.

If you're moving from our 11th Edition to the 12th Edition of Anatomy & Physiology, I think you'll find it relatively straightforward to rearrange your course content to follow the new sequence.

But you don't have to.

All the familiar content is still there.

You may decide that your own course works best with topics in another sequence. There's nothing wrong with students encountering material in one order during class and another order in their textbook. Seeing relationships from more than one direction may even help students develop a more flexible conceptual framework.

The same is true if you're moving to our book from another A&P textbook.

We didn't reorganize these chapters to tell you how you must teach reproduction.

We reorganized them because, after several years of thinking, researching, discussing, arguing, rearranging, and rearranging again, this is the clearest and most coherent way we found to tell the story.

There's more to the reproductive story

Reorganizing three chapters wasn't the only thing we changed.

We also took a fresh look at some of the most challenging reproductive concepts to explain and illustrate clearly for beginning A&P students.

One of the biggest examples is the ovary. How do we portray ovarian follicles simply enough for a beginning learner, realistically enough to avoid teaching something that isn't really there, and dynamically enough to convey that ovarian function is cyclical?

Yeah. We spent some time on that one.

I'll show you what we came up with in my next post.

If you haven't already requested a free instructor review copy of the new edition, click here and do that now.

High-school A&P instructors: These updates also apply to Anthony’s Textbook of Anatomy & Physiology, 22nd Edition, the high-school edition of the two-semester Patton A&P program.

Stress Deserves Its Own Chapter

One of the advantages of organizing anatomy and physiology concepts into short, modular chapters is that it gives us more flexibility in teaching. It also permits us to focus on important topics that are often buried within a large chapter that covers many subtopics.  Taking this advantage, Anatomy & Physiology puts the clinically important concepts of stress into a single, independent chapter.

The concepts of stress interconnect with concepts of neuroscience, endocrinology, immunology, and many others—covered in diverse chapters of a textbook and diverse modules of an A&P course. Putting the core concepts of stress into its own independent chapter means that the instructor has more flexibility in where they place in their own course structure—into their own unique telling of the story of the human body.

Our book was the first A&P textbook to have an independent stress chapter. Since its introduction, we've been keeping the content up to date and relevant to student learning—and to the clinical applications of stress they'll be making in their professional courses and careers. 

More recently, we enlisted the advice of the late Dr. Bruce McEwen, an icon of the modern concepts of human stress and it's real-life implications. Contributing author Dr. Peggie Williamson and I used Bruce's advice and his generous stack of resources to give our stress chapter a major refresh and update. You will find that the engaging story-of-stress approach remains, but with the more recent parts of that story reflected with greater clarity and relevance.

We need not let the concepts of stress be stressors themselves in our teaching and learning. Using the stress chapter in Anatomy & Physiology—a reader favorite—can help us all better understand the pivotal role stress can have in wellness and disease.

Your Modular Anatomy & Physiology Textbook

Ever dreamed of rearranging the order of topics in your course. That is, have you ever wanted to shift the order of topics as they are presented in your textbook to fit the way you tell your story of the human body? Without the obstacles of assigning a half-chapter here and the other half-chapter there—and possibly causing some students to get a bit lost?

Yeah, me too. That's why I've worked hard to move away from the gigantic-chapter model we see in most A&P textbooks to the modular model in our Anatomy & Physiology textbook. Instead of the usual 20-something large chapters commonly seen, our textbook has 48 chapters—but about the same number of pages as all the others. That is, those gigantic chapters have been broken down into smaller bits.

Besides the advantage of making our reading assignments less intimidating for students, the arrangement of concepts in smaller chapters also means that it is far easier for any instructor to move things around a bit to better suit their particular telling of the A&P story. 

For example, because the introduction to homeostasis is its own short chapter, faculty have the choice to move it's place in the course to the very beginning—before all those directional terms and cavities, and so forth Or one could move it a bit later in the course, after the foundational chemistry, cell, and tissue coverage to just prior to beginning covering the first body system. 

The short stress chapter could be moved earlier or later in the course, without having to separate it out of another larger chapter that covers other topics as well. 

One could even decide to have students learn the appendicular skeleton first, before getting to that intimidating skull and vertebral column. 

If you've not looked at the Patton Anatomy & Physiology text in a while, this might be a good time to check it out and think about it's modular structure may be a better fit for your A&P course.

You may want to learn more about the story of our smaller chapters by reading these brief posts:

• Chunking Content Provides Flexibility
• Reducing Text Anxiety
• Chunking Chapters - By the Numbers
• Homeostasis Deserves Its Own Chapter

Pandemic Scramble: Keeping It Simple

In my opinion, the big mistake that professors commonly make when moving an on-campus course to remote teaching is to make things more complicated than they need to be. That unnecessary complexity stems from the idea that one must take their entire course, including every element and detail, and move it more or less "as is" to an online environment. I think we get much better outcomes if we strive to keep it simple.

First, "remote" need not always be "online." There are a lot of learning opportunities to be had with reading and retrieval practice assignments from the Patton Anatomy & Physiology textbook. Students have invested a lot in acquiring this resource and a large team has worked together to make it an effective learning tool. Now's a great time to do better by our students by helping them engage fully in both reading and raiding their textbook. 

Second, now is a great time to revisit our learning outcomes and compare those to our course design. Most of us keep adding more expected outcomes, and therefore more content, to our courses over the years. As we consider various learning activities, we often add them rather than replace existing activities. Our course becomes bloated, complex, and heavier than it needs to be. So my advice is to prune, prune, prune to the main outcomes—the truly essential concepts—of our A&P course. Then, and only then, are we ready to move to remote teaching.

Third, rather than simply digitize our course components—recording lectures, converting tests and quizzes to online formats, etc.—we should rethink our course design. I suggest trimming back on what we are telling and showing showing students and rely more on their own discovery. And resisting the urge to use every last one of the cool toys that our instructional designers are helping us to discover.

What I mean by that is focusing our recorded lectures on the hard-to-understand "pain points" of A&P. And even then, we should consider trimming our narrative down to half or less of that 50-minute time block that we are used to. Then taking those shorter lectures and chunking them into even smaller, bite-sized pieces.

We can also substitute those occasional, mind-bending summative tests with frequent, low-stakes formative tests by using the our learning management system's online quizzing engine. This leverages the learning benefits of retrieval practice by shifting the work of learning to the student—where it belongs. This approach also makes light work of learning, thus avoiding a burdensome load during this time of stress and uncertainty.

To learn more about these suggestions and more, watch my video presentation Simple Ideas for Moving to Remote Learning or listen to an audio version from my podcast.

Don't forget all the tips I have for you at my Pandemic Teaching Resources page.

Chunking Content Provides Flexibility

In some of my previous posts, I explained some of the advantages of chunking a large volume of complex content into smaller bits:

CHUNKING

Chunking breaks content into smaller bits

Those previous discussions described chunking material into smaller chapters, smaller sections, smaller subsections, smaller paragraphs, and smaller sentences. I also described chunking material in Anatomy & Physiology in the form of summary tables that also help students discover conceptual patterns.

This post builds on these ideas by introducing the value of breaking textbook content into smaller chunks when adapting the textbook content to the specific needs of your A&P course.

In an article I wrote last year at The A&P Professor titled Your Textbook is a Mitten, Not a Glove, I called attention to the fact that each of us tailors the depth and range of topics, the style of presentation, and sometimes the sequence of concepts, to fit the specific objectives of a course—or even a particular section of the A&P course. I believe that a thoughtfully chunked textbook assists both instructors and students in making the textbook "fit" the course.

Flexibility in selecting and organizing content for your course is enhanced by having the Anatomy & Physiology textbook broken down into smaller units. For example, by having the entire course broken down into 48 chapters—instead of the usual 20-something chapters—the instructor can "move around" content into a different sequence from the Anatomy & Physiology textbook's sequence with very little disruption to the students. Reducing disruption by being able to move whole chapters—rather than a half or third of a chapter here and there--can greatly enhance the student experience. It also makes it easier for the instructor, who is thus relieved from unraveling the confusion in syllabi, course schedules, and student inquiries.

Smaller, more discrete chapter topics also makes it easier to skip a topic. For example, in some programs, most topics in immunity are not covered in the A&P course, but are instead covered in microbiology or another course. Most A&P books combine lymphatic and immunity topics into a single chapter, so an A&P professor may find themselves wrestling with the student confusion caused by assigning only a partial chapter.

And "good luck" if your students are using a published workbook or online adaptive learning tool that is organized by chapter.

In Anatomy & Physiology, however, separate chapters on lymphatics, innate immunity, and adaptive immunity make it very easy to reorganize—or even skip—topics to suit the needs of a particular A&P course.

Students benefit from clear organization

Likewise, carefully subdivided sections and subsections assist instructors in skipping or rearranging the sequence of topics within a particular chapter. Even if the instructor does not call attention to a rearrangement of certain elements of the A&P story in class (vs. the sequence in the textbook), the clear labeling of discrete sections and subsections helps the student figure out where the concepts are covered in the textbook.

Chunking has many benefits—and we can now see that enhancing the instructor's flexibility in organizing course content is one of them. And that can result in less student confusion—and greater student success.

Images: Robert Michie (top)

KPatton (middle)

Griszka Niewiadomski (bottom)

Tables Help Students Recognize Patterns

One of the things our Anatomy & Physiology books are known and loved for is their extensive set summary tables. Although students quickly discover how useful they are, I'm not sure many A&P professors give them much thought.  But as an A&P author, I have to give them a lot of thought—and I want to share a few of my thoughts about these tables that may surprise you!

Tables help students construct a conceptual framework.
Sometimes, beginning students are so overwhelmed with details that they have a hard time seeing how it all fits together into a whole idea. Summary tables bring details together in a way that assists learners in starting their own cognitive scaffold for new facts and ideas. Those of us who already appreciate "the big picture," often forget how critical it is for newbies to properly build their understanding in steps.

Tables serve as a handy reference tool.
Students often use their textbooks for "raiding" specific facts, rather than reading whole sections.  For example, when learning the bones and markings of the skeleton, summary tables can quickly and effectively give a pithy description of illustrated structures in the textbook. As professors, we often forget how much the beginner relies on such tools to get started in learning.

Tables help students recognize patterns.
Many of the tables in an A&P textbook are not meant to be memorized.  Instead, they are used to compare and contrast ideas in a visual way that is difficult to do in the text narrative.  This moves students beyond "just the facts" to how those facts can be applied in understanding human structure and function.  In a table, patterns become obvious and critical thinking starts to "click" in the minds of readers. We instructors, who have already had our "aha" moments with these topics, sometimes don't appreciate how helpful a carefully arranged table can be in producing such moments.

Tables must be easily readable.
This may seem too obvious a fact to mention here. However, I've found that well-prepared teachers can easily read and understand even a horribly formatted, vaguely written table. Students who are just learning the concepts often get lost as they go across a row and don't know enough to figure out where they are supposed to look next.  Which brings me to my final, and perhaps most important, point . . .

Effective tables are carefully designed.
This is what makes a table easily readable—thoughtful design. In the latest revision of Anatomy & Physiology, effective table design is a major focus.  Having experimented in previous editions, I collaborated with our designer, editors, and previous students, to find a format that is both "readable" and "raidable."  I'll list a few things we did to make that happen in a moment.  But first, I also want to mention that I also put a lot of work into making sure that content that lends itself to a summary table is put into a table in way that complements and supports the text narrative.  That is, the table content is not simply a re-hash of the text—it is a thoughtful rearrangement of concepts to add more depth to student learning.

Table design features that promote effective learning in Anatomy & Physiology:

• Background screens
• Different shades of color behind different rows of each table helps the brain quickly see logical groupings of concepts.  
• The color of the screens is apparent, but not too bright or too saturated to distract the brain from the content
• Rules (borders)
• White horizontal rules are just visible enough that they (along with the color screens) subtly guide the reader's eye across rows
• Vertical rules help the reader clearly distinguish columns and cells so that it is clear how the concepts are organized in the table
• Fonts
• Font sizing allows tables of a compact size—which allows ease of seeing patterns in the whole—but is still big enough for easy reading
• Intentional use of boldface and italic headings within the more complex table help clarify the organization of ideas—thus reducing the cognitive load of understanding table content
• The occasional use of color fonts helps highlight conceptual patterns
• For example, the book's color code can be applied in tables related to blood vessels (oxygenated red and deoxy blue) or nerves (afferent blue and efferent red)
• Illustrations
• Judicious use of small, embedded or nearby sketches help students more clearly "see" the concepts listed in a table
• This is a careful balancing act, because tables with overly large illustrations, too many illustrations, or very complex illustrations can reduce the effectiveness of a table

There is lot more to what goes into designing each table in Anatomy & Physiology to make it an effective learning tool.  But this post is already almost too much to read in one sitting, eh? In later posts, I'll be calling attention to particular tables—especially those new to the latest edition—to give examples of how effective they are for deep student learning.

Chunking Chapters - By The Numbers

I recently outlined my rationale for chunking textbook chapters into smaller bits. In the article Reducing Text Anxiety, I explain that breaking large chapters into smaller chapters improves reading comprehension.  Learning experts call this "reducing cognitive load" and both expert and poor readers benefit by shorter chapters. Now let's look at the numbers behind this chunking.

Comparison to the Previous Edition

As the first table shows, the average chapter length of the new edition of Anatomy & Physiology has dropped by a whopping 23% without changing the length of the textbook.  Likewise, the longest chapter in the book is now 19% shorter than the longest chapter in the previous edition.

	A&P/8e	A&P/9e	Difference
Total (chapters)	37	48	+11
Total (pages)	1140	1140	same
Average (pages/chapter)	30.8	23.8	- 23%
Shortest chapter (pages)	16	12	-25%
Longest chapter (pages	52	43	-19%

Comparison to Other A&P Textbooks

The second table compares a few other 2-semester A&P textbooks to the new edition of our Anatomy & Physiology.  At an average chapter length of only 24 pages, our chapters are about 12 pages (33%) shorter than the nearest compared textbook.  And our chapters are 19 pages (44%) shorter than the compared textbook with the longest chapter average.

Again, our Anatomy & Physiology has 33-44% shorter chapters compared to other A&P textbooks of comparable length and coverage.

Textbook	Chapter Count	Page Count	Average Pages / Chapter
Seeley 10e	29	1248	43.0
McKinley 1e	29	1169	40.3
Saladin 6e	29	1136	39.2
Tortora 14e	29	1127	38.9
Hole 13e	24	925	38.5
Martini 9e	29	1114	38.4
Marieb (big) 9e	29	1107	38.2
Marieb (little) 5e	26	923	35.5
Patton 9e	48	1140	23.8

As an expert reader myself, I would much rather be tackling a technical textbook that is chunked into smaller, more digestible chapters. I can only imagine how much more helpful such chunking will be for readers who:

• struggle with reading
• have too many distractions in their lives
• are challenged with learning in English
• are underprepared
• have learning disabilities

Update Guide

How do you know where the changes are when your A&P textbook is revised?

How many times have you flipped through a chapter in a new edition and thought, "this looks pretty much the same as in the last edition"—only to have a student later point out that a term has changed, an image revised, or a section added?

Yeah, me too!

So that's why I've started keeping a log of all the changes I make globally and as I revise each chapter for a new edition.  This log—called a Conversion/Update Guide—is available to instructors.  Starting with the upcoming 9th edition of Anatomy & Physiology, teachers can log into the Instructor Resources at Evolve to access this handy guide.

For example, in a recent post I outlined a few improvements to a newly minted chapter devoted to homeostasis. When you start using the new edition of Anatomy & Physiology, you may wonder how this was split out (chunked) from the larger chapter in the previous edition and exactly what changes were made. That is, you want to know what specifically will impact your teaching.

With the new update guide, you'll be able to see what changes were made and you can then easily determine which, if any, have a practical impact on your course.  Perhaps you need to change a chapter number, or maybe provide an alternate term, or possibly add a new image to your PowerPoint presentation.

I always wanted to have something like this when I was teaching other courses and a new edition of the textbook came out.  Even when I found the changes on my own (or more likely, when a student pointed out a conflict between what I told them was in the book and what was actually in the book), I didn't always understand why those changes were made.

So I created the update guide so you can not only see what revisions were made, but also a brief note about the rationale for the changes.

My plan is to also share some additional background and rationales for specific updates and textbook features here in this blog, where I have a bit more space to fully explain them.  Please consider subscribing by email so you don't miss any new posts!  Just fill out the brief SUBSCRIPTION FORM.

Cartoon:adapted from Raúl Ruano Ruiz

Photo: K Patton

Homeostasis Deserves Its Own Chapter

Homeostasis is a major theme of every anatomy and physiology course, so why not explore this important principle in a single, focused chapter?

In a recent post, I explained my rationale for chunking Anatomy & Physiology into smaller chapters than are typical among A&P textbooks.  This provides the opportunity to devote a single, compact chapter to the concept of homeostasis.

Starting in the upcoming 9th edition, the second chapter of Anatomy & Physiology is devoted solely to describing the concept of homeostasis and explaining its central role in maintaining normal function of the human body.  This comes after a brief introductory chapter outlining the nature of the human life sciences and the organization of the body.

This reorganization also provides the opportunity to chunk the sections and provide headings and subheadings that help readers understand how various aspects of homeostasis "hang together."

• Homeostasis
• The Internal Environment
• Relative Stability
• Set Point
• Models of Homeostasis
• Homeostatic Control Mechanisms
• Feedback Loops
• Basic Components of Control Systems
• Sensor
• Integrator
• Effector
• Feedback
• Negative Feedback in Control Systems
• Positive Feedback in Control Systems
• Changing the Set Point
• Feed-Forward in Control Systems
• Levels of Homeostatic Control
• Summary of Homeostasis
• Cycle of Life: Life Span Considerations
• The Big Picture: Homeostasis
• Mechanisms of Disease
• Basic Mechanisms of Disease
• Risk Factors
• Case Study

By focusing on homeostasis and the underlying role it plays in nearly all body functions in this manner, students "get it" in a way that helps them move into the remainder of their A&P course with clearer understanding of the big picture.

A few other improvements to coverage of homeostasis in this newly formed chapter include:

Concepts

• A brief discussion of circadian rhythms helps students better understand that set points can change in a daily pattern, thus preparing them for such patterns encountered in later chapters
• Clarification that feedback loops can be understood as stimulus-response mechanisms, which helps students apply homeostatic principles to nervous system applications

Learning Objects

• A new table listing homeostatic functions of each major body system helps students better visualize the global aspects of homeostasis
• New set of graphs showing circadian cycles in various physiological variables helps students visualize an important concept, while also introducing them to interpretation of physiological graphs
• A new diagram representing disease as a loss of homeostatic balance helps student understand the role of homeostasis in health and disease
• A new case study helps students practice applying concepts of homeostasis to clinical examples

Examples

• More examples of negative-feedback mechanisms, positive-feedback control, feed-forward regulation help students better understand and apply these concepts
• The model of a tightrope walker (Wallenda model) was added to illustrate concepts of homeostasis missed by the engineered control system model and the fishbowl model of homeostasis
• A cross-reference to the new A&P Connect article The Human Microbiome helps students integrate the concept of microbial function with the functions of human organs and systems.
• New boxed content on negative feedback during exercise helps students apply concepts of homeostatic regulation to real-world situations

Photo: topfer (freeimages)