Flipped Classroom Teaching of Medical Physiology and Anatomy in the Special Master’s Program: A Five-Year Evaluation

The Special Master’s Program at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC SMP) is a one year academic enhancement MS program that prepares students for future success in medical school. Its curriculum covers about half of the material in the first year basic science curriculum of Georgetown’s School of Medicine, supplemented with complementary graduate courses. GUMC SMP students attend the relevant basic science lectures with first year medical students (M1), are assessed by completing the same multiple choice questions used for their M1 counterparts and are graded against the M1 average to determine grades for corresponding SMP medical courses. In 2015, a second campus, the Georgetown Downtown SMP (GTDT), was opened that follows the same curriculum, but with all material delivered in a fully “flipped” manner. The GTDT students' average undergraduate GPA and MCAT scores are not different from the GUMC SMP students, whereas the average GPAs of SMP students are significantly lower than GPAs of their M1 peers (3.2 vs 3.7 in M1 class). The GTDT students review the lecture capture (LC) recordings of medical (or graduate) lectures on their own time and attend 2-4 hrs of class time four days per week during which the GTDT instructor provides active learning sessions to reinforce the material. The current research expands on our earlier findings, by evaluating the GTDT cohort performance in six medical physiology exams and three medical gross anatomy (GA) exams over the past five years compared to GUMC SMP peers and M1 students. Using the Student’s t test with the Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons, significance level was designated at p<0.05. Our results indicate that the GTDT students continued to outperform their GUMC SMP counterparts in all exams, reaching statistical significance in three out of six medical physiology exams and three out of three medical GA exams. The GTDT students also had higher average scores than their peer M1 students on five out of six medical physiology exams, reaching significance in three out of the six M1 exams. GTDT averages were higher than M1 students on GA exams, but differences did not reach statistical significance. The higher GTDT performance is most likely attributable to the students being actively engaged in flipped learning in all classroom sessions. Additionally, GTDT students’ responses to anonymous polling showed that they felt the active learning exercises were beneficial to their overall learning and their long-term retention of the material. Overall, our results continue to validate the successful use of the active learning environment in medical education, confirm its successful use in the GTDT program, and suggest that the flipped learning modality results in overall better learning outcomes in a rigorous medical curriculum. Georgetown University This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2025 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.