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.
