Embryology and Teratology in the Curricula of Healthcare Courses

Significant changes are occurring worldwide in courses for healthcare studies, including medicine and dentistry. Critical evaluation of the place, timing, and content of components that can be collectively grouped as the anatomical sciences has however yet to be adequately undertaken. Surveys of teaching hours for embryology in US and UK medical courses clearly demonstrate that a dramatic decline in the importance of the subject is in progress, in terms of both a decrease in the number of hours allocated within the medical course and in relation to changes in pedagogic methodologies. In this article, we draw attention to the need to provide within medical and dental curricula a universally accepted terminology for embryology and teratology, to develop core syllabuses and, in addition to providing professional training, to follow the practice of university education in taking students to the frontiers of knowledge. We also discuss different ways of teaching and assessing embryology and teratology, preferring to see the employment of practical methodologies, and we highlight problems related to the poor attitudes of students towards the perceived clinical relevance of embryology and teratology

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Assessment in anatomy

From an educational perspective, a very important problem is that of assessment, for establishing competency and as selection criterion for different professional purposes. Among the issues to be addressed are the methods of assessment and/or the type of tests, the range of scores, or the definition of honour degrees. The methods of assessment comprise such different forms such as the spotter examination, short or long essay questions, short answer questions, true-false questions, single best answer questions, multiple choice questions, extended match questions, or several forms of oral approaches such as viva voce examinations.Knowledge about this is important when assessing different educational objectives; assessing educational objectives from the cognitive domain will need different assessment instruments than assessing educational objectives from the psychomotor domain or even the affective domain.There is no golden rule, which type of assessment instrument or format will be the best in measuring certain educational objectives; but one has to respect that there is no assessment instrument, which is capable to assess educational objectives from all domains of educational objectives.Whereas the first two or three levels of progress can be assessed by well-structured written examinations such as multiple choice questions, or multiple answer questions, other and higher level progresses need other instruments, such as a thesis, or direct observation.This is no issue at all in assessment tools, where the students are required to select the appropriate answer from a given set of choices, as in true false questions, MCQ, EMQ, etc. The standard setting is done in these cases by the selection of the true answer

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