Handouts as an educational support for the teaching/learning program in Clinical Anatomy

Handouts were developed to support the program of Clinical Anatomy in the Medical School of Porto, and since 1996/97 alterations have been made to improve their format and content with our educational objectives in mind. A questionnaire was designed to evaluate the opinion of second-year medical students enrolled in the program. Students were asked about their approval of the way handouts were organized and their usefulness, especially for lectures and practical sessions on physical examination, sectional and imaging anatomy, anatomical variations and malformations and case studies. Of 152 students, 138 (90.8%) returned the questionnaire. To describe the relationship between the value of handouts and several aspects of their organization and adequacy, the Spearman rank correlation coefficient was used for lectures, and canonical correlation for the various practical sessions. Students fully approved the way the handouts of lectures and practical sessions were organized (81.8% and 87%, respectively), their presentation (74.6% and 86.2%), relevance (88.3% and 85.5%), usefulness in understanding the lectures (77.6%) and their value in preparing for practical sessions (83.3%). Handouts were considered highly useful for case studies (90%), physical examination (81.9%) and sectional anatomy (65.7%). Students stating a higher degree of utility of the handouts emphasized that they were useful—indeed essential—in preparing for sessions, and noted their objectivity. The evaluation of the handouts was highly favorable and showed that they can be used as a guide through the complexities of an innovative program of Clinical Anatomy. Clin. Anat. 12:337–344, 1999. © 1999 Wiley-Liss, Inc.