Curricular changes: the impact on medical students knowledge of neuroanatomy

BACKGROUND: Although neuroanatomy is considered an essential requirement in medical curriculum, its teaching has undergone many changes in recent years, with most medical schools starting to implement an integrated approach. The current paper describes the comparative evaluation of the neuroanatomy knowledge scores of medical students who attended two different pedagogic approaches of neuroanatomy in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto. METHODS: Forty fourth-year medical students who attended a traditional stand-alone approach and 42 third-year medical students who attended an integrated approach completed a written test of knowledge. RESULTS: Although there were some significant differences, the results globally revealed no statistically significant difference between the neuroanatomy knowledge scores of the integrated and traditional education groups, with most students obtaining a passing score in both curricula. CONCLUSIONS: Our study is the first attempt to compare the knowledge acquired by medical students from two different pedagogical approaches to neuroanatomy. Although the integrated curricula were only implemented in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto a few years ago, the students who attended these curricula obtained similar scores as those obtained by the students of the traditional curriculum. This finding suggests that an integrated curriculum can be, in light of curricular reform, an efficient approach to teaching neuroanatomy to medical students.