We investigated the effect of three different lecture delivery modalities in a foundational anatomy course on student exam performance, including: (1) asynchronous recordings, (2) passive lecture with a student’s choice to view synchronously or asynchronously, and (3) active lecturing, again with student’s viewing choice. Active lectures incorporated gapped lecturing, drawing, practice questions, and active study technique suggestions. We compared four-unit exams that were similar across the four semesters investigated. This data set has been de-identified.

Data was gathered across four semesters and represents individual student exam scores.

The sample population included all students enrolled in Anatomy 2300 and was a non-random sampling approach based on their participation within the course of Human Anatomy at The Ohio State University – Columbus Campus during the Autumn 2021 (n = 512), Spring 2022 (n = 612), Autumn 2022 (n = 656), and Spring 2023 (n = 695) semesters, resulting in a total sample size of 2,543 students. A post hoc power analysis was conducted using G*Power, yielding a power of 0.99, larger than the recommended power of 0.8 for statistical analyses. The margin of error was 0.03, and the correlation between measures was 0.76. The sample size required to achieve this power calculation was 1511.11.

Each semester, four in-person proctored unit exams were given via Carmen, OSU’s Canvas Learning Management System (Instructure Inc., Salt Lake City, UT), with a lockdown browser, to evaluate the progress of the student. Exam questions were subject to minimal changes between different semesters, with the questions covering the same content and learning objectives each semester. Questions were mapped directly to lecture objectives with even distribution among the lectures within the unit and checked by the course director and lecture teaching assistant. Each question and bank were validated by the course director, lecture teaching assistant and at least one graduate teaching assistant. Questions included multiple choice first and second order questions, as well as matching and identification questions. All questions had answer options, there were no fill in the blanks. Many questions were banked so that a student would receive a random question out of two to six options covering the same lecture objective. Exam statistics were reviewed after each exam. If the discrimination index, which divides students into three groups based on their score on the whole quiz and displays those groups by who answered the question correctly, as calculated by Canvas, was less than 0.2 and less than 50 percent of the class answered correctly, everyone was given credit, and the question was re-written for the following semester. This was done for an average of one out of 50 questions on each unit exam. All exam scores were de-identified and assigned a record code to match each piece of data to their individual records.

The Anatomy 2300 students come from Health Science, University Exploration, Arts and Sciences, Dental Hygiene, Pre-Nursing, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Pre-Optometry, Pre-Pharmacy, Pre-Dental and Exercise Science programs. All students were enrolled together into an in-person 55-minute lecture every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Pre-recorded lectures were used during the Autumn 2021 semester (Semester 1 in Table 1, Figure 2). During the Spring 2022 (Semester 2), Autumn 2022 (Semester 3), and Spring 2023 (Semester 4) semesters, these lectures were conducted via a Zoom webinar and were also recorded and posted online for students to review at their leisure.