Shifting perspectives on professional skills and teamwork development across undergraduate cohorts

Physiology students recognize the need for professional skills development, but until recently, their perception of learning skills such as communication, teamwork, and related competencies remained largely unknown. Our group evaluated the shifts in perspectives in independent student cohorts regarding professional skills development before and after the COVID pandemic. Using a validated survey, the Science Student Skills Inventory, we evaluated 551 undergraduate students on the themes of inclusion, importance, improvement and confidence on multiple professional skills. A theme-specific composite score for each participant was established by averaging the first 2 factor scores and further standardizing into a theme-specific z-score per participant. Initial results suggest that students (especially those aged 21-23) were more likely to report professional skills integration into a wider range of course types (p=0.009) and assessments (p< 0.001) compared to pre-COVID students. However, students reported feeling lower perceived improvement (p=0.026) and lower perceived importance (p=0.021) in professional skills in the post-COVID vs the pre-COVID group. Communication skills were reported as highly important but showed the least improvement, while writing and quantitative skills were rated least important overall. New survey data indicates that 79% enjoy teamwork during class time; however, 51% disliked teamwork activities outside of class time. Open-ended responses were telling in that students’ perception of teamwork was as a method of task completion rather than an opportunity for collaboration and shared learning. While students perceived greater utilization of professional skills in coursework and assessments, they did not perceive greater inclusion overall (e.g., “included ‘a little,’ ‘moderate,’ ‘a lot’”) when asked more granularly, suggesting that their presence alone may not equate to meaningful engagement or relevance. Moreover, confidence in skill development remained low across both cohorts and did not change through this instructional transition. With only 23% of students reporting consistent guidance on how to work effectively in teams, these results may prompt instructor efforts to align curricular intent with students’ perceived value of these activities. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 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.