New Anatomy & Physiology Resource: Positive A&P Muscular System Review!

Have you ever watched my videos or used them in class and wished there were aligned practice questions to go with them?

I’ve been working the folks at PositiveSTEM (a.k.a., Positive Physics) to develop a FREE review unit on the muscular system. To use it with your classes, just go to www.positivestem.org and sign up for a free account!

Basically, we took my muscular system videos and created questions that go along with each video. The questions are divided into skills, some of which build on each other. (E.g., one skill might have students label the sliding filament model, and the next skill has them explaining the process.)

Here’s a webinar we did to demonstrate how the platform works and what the questions look like.

Benefits of the PositiveSTEM platform

The PositiveSTEM platform is great for this kind of review for several reasons:

• It gives students immediate feedback on their answers.
• It allows teachers to track student performance. Teachers can see an accuracy score (% of questions answered correctly on the first try) and a completion score (% of questions answered correctly after any number of attempts).
• It’s aligned with my videos. If you already use my videos in your classroom, this would be a perfect fit! And it not, the videos are embedded in the “Lesson” section of each skill, so students can go back and watch the video if they need to learn the content or get a refresher on it.

Here are a few images of the interface. First, students choose (or a teacher can assign) which skill they are going to practice. This brings them to the video lesson and a set of questions for that skill. (Each video covers multiple skills.)

Students submit answers through drop-down menus as they progress through question sets. They get immediate feedback on whether their answer was correct. And teachers can track all of this through their own dashboard.

The Content Covered

This review unit currently covers the concepts from my three muscular system videos. This covers everything from movement terms, identify major superficial muscles and their antagonists, and explaining the sliding filament model. The full list of skills covered is listed under each video here.

And here are some screenshots of the types of questions found in the problem sets (click images to enlarge):

And most importantly…

This is all free!

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Next steps for the Positive Anatomy & Physiology course

At the moment, we’re trying this unit out to get feedback and gauge interest in a full A&P course. If all goes well, we’ll create the rest of the units throughout the ’24-’25 school year and keep the course completely free during that time. Then after that (’25-’26 and beyond), it would be a paid subscription. (My school currently pays for the Positive Physics course, and I use the Positive Chemistry course with my AP classes, and I think the prices are reasonable. There’s also a pay-what-you-can option if your school doesn’t have the funds to pay for it.)

We hope you find this resource helpful! And please leave us feedback on how we can improve it.

+A&P Demo Webinar

Here is a webinar we did demonstrating the muscular system review unit. Check it out to see what how the interface works and what the questions look like.