Implementation of an Integrated Longitudinal Curricular Activity for Graduating Pharmacy Students

Abstract

Objectives. To evaluate whether a novel integrated longitudinal curricular activity to prepare graduating doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) students for 2 comprehensive examinations was successful, and to assess whether it engaged other pharmacy students in curricular discussion and learning. Design. Thirty-eight of 91graduating third-year (P3) students in a PharmD program formed 11 teams to create and present pharmacotherapeutic posters to their peers. The impact of the novel activity on graduating students' performance on the North American Pharmacist Licensure Examination (NAPLEX) and a comprehensive commercial examination was assessed. All first-year (P1), secondyear (P2), and P3 students reviewed and discussed the content of each poster. Assessment. Participants in the integrated longitudinal curricular activity performed better than nonparticipants on the commercial examination (p50.023) and NAPLEX (p50.033). However, regardless of participation, commercial examination scores predicted a significant amount of variance (ie, 34%) in NAPLEX scores. The P3 participants (83%) believed the curricular activity assisted them in their NAPLEX preparation, while 75% of P1 students, 79% of P2 students, and 80% of P3 students agreed that poster review provided an effective summary of different disease states. Ninety percent of faculty poster evaluators reported that the posters were professional, and all evaluators agreed that participants effectively conveyed their message to the intended audience. Conclusion. The integrated longitudinal curricular activity provided a positive learning environment for all pharmacy students and may have better prepared graduating students' for the NAPLEX.

Progress test: A review to motivate their use in pharmacy schools in Brazil

“…The Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education recommends that pharmacy schools can use evaluations that can achieve desired educational objectives. In this context, progress test has been used as both formative assessment as summative (Duncan-Hewitt et al, 2007;Szilagyi, 2008;Anderson Jr and Nelson, 2011;UCL, 2014;Karimi et al, 2014).…”

A systematic review to investigate student performance and their learning experiences within integrated healthcare curricula

“…The number of students experiencing the integrated educational activities was not always described, but where included, cohorts varied from relatively small, approximately 30-40, to very large, approximately 1000-2000 students. Most studies, (n=34) adopted surveys to capture student feedback [10,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][34][35][36][37][38][39][43][44][45][46][47][48][49], six studies employed student interviews or focus groups [11,12,27,29,36,37] and 24 assessed student performance at a terminal assessment [10,14,15,17,18,21,[23]…”

“…Half of the studies (n=20) described activities at the interdisciplinary level of integration [12,13,[15][16][17][18]20,21,[23][24][25][27][28][29]31,35,37,[44][45][46] and eight described elements of, or a full curriculum, at the transdisciplinary level [10,11,22,[39][40][41]43,49]. Two studies described interventions at the correlation [26,32], and at the multidisciplinary levels [14,31], and one at the complementary level [42]. It was unclear in six studies, due to the lack of detail provided [19,30,33,34,38,47].…”

“…Eleven of the studies did not include details of assessment strategy, or there was insufficient detail to discern the learning domain within which students were being assessed [11,16,[18][19][20]22,25,28,31,33,34,36,44,[47][48][49]. All of the studies, which included a sufficiently detailed assessment strategy, described assignments examining students' ability to apply knowledge [12][13][14]23,27,[37][38][39]42,[44][45][46], analyse [21,31], synthesise [10,14,17,21,24,26,27,30] and evaluate [26,30]. Three studies assessed across the breadth of learning domains from knowledge recall through to evaluation [15,29,32].…”

“…Thirty-three studies [10,[14][15][16][17][18]21,[23][24][25][26][28][29][30][31][32][33]35,38,[40][41][42][43][44][45] reported on aspects of student performance after experiencing the integrated educational activity. Nine studies compared performance of students experiencing the integrated curriculum to students in previous cohorts experiencing a less integrated programme [10,17,21,28,29,31,35,43,45].…”