The Heart of the Matter: Exploring Exercise in Cardiac Disease

By Cathy Roy, Dawson College

At a Glance

Discipline

  • Health science

Instructional Level

  • College & CEGEP

Course

  • Interventions in vascular and respiratory conditions (144-551)

Tasks in Workflow

Social Plane(s)

  • Group

Type of Tasks

  • Collecting & seeking information

Technical Details

Useful Technologies

  • Perusall

Class size

  • Small (20-49)

Time

  • Brief segment of class period (< 20 mins)

Inclusivity & Accessibility

  • Diversity of engagement
  • Variety of representations
  • Variety of action & expression

Instructional Purpose

  • Preparation & knowledge activation
  • Application & knowledge building

Overview

The purpose of this activity is to deepen the students’ understanding of cardiac pathophysiology and the physiological benefits of exercise. Understanding guidelines for exercise prescription in high-risk populations will encourage students to make sound clinical choices. Knowing the value of exercise will empower students to motivate clients and be advocates for prevention and health promotion in their future career roles. A side benefit is helping them to navigate complex and difficult to read scientific articles and translate them into clear utility for their careers as clinicians.

Instructional Objectives

Students will be able to:

  • Explain the physiological benefits of exercise in a particular cardiac condition, adapting the explanation to both a future clinical supervisor (or teacher) and a future client.
  • Extract useful information from a dense scientific meta-analysis, with the support of their teacher and colleagues.

Workflow & Materials

Workflow

Activity Workflow

View on CourseFlow
logo saltise
Document

Perusall instructions

Cathy Roy

Article

Benefits of Exercise in High Risk Populations: "Exercise and the Cardiovascular System"

Contributor's Notes

Benefits
Challenges
Tips
Benefits
  • Students are less overwhelmed by the article when scaffolded this way.
  • Breaks common misconception that there is nothing that can help with cardiac conditions (i.e. that all treatments are for maintenance only) by demonstrating clear benefits and direct impact of exercise on disease pathophysiology for various cardiac conditions.
  • Helps students practice “translating” jargon into terms understandable by clients without losing the essence of the content.
Challenges
  • Students must complete the prep activity for the exercise to work. If there are not enough students or enough responses in the group they have less raw data with which to complete the activity. Suggested group size approximately 10-12 students.
  • Remind them to bring in their “highlights”. Alternately, Perusall allows the teacher to “collect highlights” that could then be transported into a MIRO board for easy sorting if high-tech room is available.
Tips
  • Be very clear that “mined data” will be used for an in-class activity, so students remember to bring in their work to use.
  • The larger the groups, the more responses to “pool”, so adjust accordingly to make it both meaningful and manageable. Perusall can be very useful for further scaffolding of the reading with prompts, and for students to enter their “jargon translations” for other students to see. However the activity can be completed without Perusall and without the magnetic cards (students write their answers directly on the boards, or on cards sorted onto tables, etc.)
  • Use the consolidation discussion to draw links between the activity and future clinical or public health implications (or other learning objectives).
  • Increase difficulty by having students come up with the categories (different groups might have different categories) or organize the data into a concept map.

Applied Strategies

Flipped Classroom

Preparation for the classroom

Concept Mapping

Visual representation of knowledge