Purpose: The teaching of human anatomy for medical students requires remarkable teaching hours on the dissection of cadavers. Most medical schools are facing the challenges of teaching anatomy with limited teaching time. Innovative teaching methods are needed to help students establish anatomical knowledge. This study was aimed to evaluate the benefits of writing laboratory previews in anatomy dissection courses. Methods: Our data were collected from 135 medical students who studied human anatomy. The data included times of laboratory previews and scores of lecture and laboratory examinations. Students' examination performance was divided into three groups: low (≤ 25 percentile), middle (25 percentile < score < 75 percentile), and high performance (≥ 75 percentile). We then conducted statistical analysis to understand whether more times of laboratory previews could improve academic performance. Results: There was a significant improvement between the groups of eight previews (49.2 ± 4.2) and six previews (37.6 ± 4.5) in low academic performance students (P = 0.04). Furthermore, there was a significant improvement in the group of eight previews in comparison with the group of seven previews (69.9 ± 3.3 vs. 58.0 ± 3.5; P = 0.01) in the academic performance of between 25 and 75 percentile group, which majority of the medical students belonged. Conclusions: Writing laboratory previews for anatomy dissection courses was beneficial for students. Our data indicated that laboratory previews improved laboratory performance in the majority of students. The quality of laboratory previews could be added as another parameter to assess the impacts of laboratory previews on learning anatomy.