The primary purpose of this creative project was to demonstrate the need for, and the subsequent development of, an anatomy/physiology course model designed in concept and implemented with representative content so as to provide unique curricular and instructional advantages to community college based allied health career students.To accomplish this purpose, three objectives were achieved. They were:1. to ascertain the nature and form of anatomy/ physiology courses currently offered for students of allied health career programs in community colleges.2. to develop a curriculum model for an anatomy/ physiology course proposed to more appropriately meet institutional and student needs than courses currently offered in that basic science.3. to construct a valid evaluative instrument which could be used to assess the opinion of administrative heads of health career programs regarding the efficacy of the proposed curriculum.In order to achieve the first objective, fifty community colleges were randomly chosen for survey. These colleges represented a sample of all community colleges which hosted from four to twenty programs in nursing and allied health careers and which indicated full time student enrollments of from 2500 to 15,000. The types of allied health career programs and the form of anatomy/physiology offered by each college was determined by a study of selected college catalogs and national. directories. It was found that, in these colleges, there does exist a wide variety of curricular forms of anatomy/physiology taken by health career programs. Multi-curriculum forms were especially prevalent and where core courses did exist, theywere described in the catalogs of the colleges as a sequence of two interdependent courses.In order to demonstrate that an anatomy/physiology course could be developed which would provide not only commonalities in content but relativeness to the student's career interest area, this creative project formulated in concept and implemented with representative content a unique instructional design for anatomy/physiology which entailed the differentiation of course concepts through core and modular curricular forms. This technique of graded topic complexity was demonstrated within the project model at the total course, course topic and modular level of instruction. This was achieved by considering total course content as typically represented in anatomy/physiology texts and college catalog course descriptions and then differentiating that content into basic and advanced levels of comprehension. In addition to this content differentiation, behavioral objectives were also differentiated into basic and advanced levels for one suggested unit of instruction.Because innovative curriculum forms, when proposed by writers, often do not take into account the impact of their implementation upon students, faculty or administration, it was also an objective of this project to provide the design of an attitudinal scale which could serve as an evaluative instrument for institutional review of the curriculum. This scale was developed along the lines of a Likert type scale. Scale items were first validated through expert opinion and final items were derived after item analysis, employing a discriminatory power technique. While neither the scale nor the model curriculum itself was distributed to any real sample of individuals for assessment of opinion regarding the curriculum structure, facsimile data was introduced and a statistical technique utilized which demonstrated the manner in which significance of difference of opinion between two hypothetical groups could be determined.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/181533 |
| Date | January 1974 |
| Creators | Twardowicz, Mitchell L. |
| Contributors | Payne, Wayne A. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | vii, 121 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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