Discussion ( Con’t )

1. Assessment of Student Knowledge in Individual Content Areas for Nine Integrated Drugs and Disease Courses S. W. Zito, M. E. Gillespie, A. C. Marziliano, G. M. LaPan • Discussion (Con’t) • c. The average grades on the therapeutic questions across all 9 D&Ds ranged from 70% to 79% demonstrating that this key competency is being acquired by the students. • 2. Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficients • a. There were no strong correlations between the grades in the Introductory courses and grades in the discipline-specific questions across all nine D&Ds. The range was 0.07 to 0.42. • b. There was a very poor correlation (<0.2) for General Pathology and Pathophysiology in D&D Cardio-Renal 1 and 2 (0.15 and 0.07) as well as for D&D Skin (0.15). Additionally, Introduction to Pharmacology and Pharmacology in D&D Skin (0.14) showed a poor correlation. • c. There was a poor correlation for Introduction to MedChem and Medchem in D&D of GI/GU (0.16). • d. These poor results may indicate a need to review the content of the Introductory courses to identify areas that need improvement. • 3. Introductory Course Quartile Comparison • a. The students who do well in the Introductory courses (quartiles 1 or 2) show a higher probability of doing poorly in the discipline-specific content of the D&Ds (quartiles 3 or 4). The converse is also true. The cause of this is not clear but may involve a number of factors: grade inflation in the Introductory courses; students have difficulty adapting to an integrated team-taught course or the Introductory material is not relevant to the D&D content. • b. Sometimes these reversals are quite dramatic. For example almost 90% of all quartiles do worse in D&D 4th Year Pathophysiology and in 4th Year MedChem. • c. On the other hand, the 5th year cohort tended to improve. For example there are dramatic improvements in 5th Year Pathophysiology and in 5th Year Med Chem. This could possibly indicate that after 6 D&Ds, the students who struggled with the Introductory courses have improved study habits and strategies for the D&Ds. • Conclusions • Student performance is reassuring since in general, we see no specific discipline area in which the students are consistently doing poorly. However, there are D&Ds where students are under achieving: Pathophysiology in D&D Cardio-Renal 1 and 2 and Neoplasia; Pharmacology in Cardio-Renal 2 and MedChem in Infectious Disease. Whether this is due to poor preparation in Introductory courses is hard to tell since there were only weak Pearson correlations between Introductory courses and the D&Ds. This can also be seen in the Introductory course quartile comparisons. Student performance is in flux with the student’s ability to do better over the D&D sequence. Students who did extremely well in the Introductory courses can stay the same or decrease in performance whereas those students who did poorly in the Introductory courses are more likely to improve their grades. • The results are indicative of a complex dynamic at work: • -Students have to adapt to factors related to team teaching. • -Students have to adapt to the rapid pace of content delivery as well as delivery styles of different faculty. • -Depending on the specific D&D, students may opt to spend less time studying a certain discipline-specific content area in favor of one they perceive as more important/difficult in order to pass the course…a logical strategy. • Taken together these observations suggest that judging future student performance by using Introductory course metrics is fraught with difficulties. However, we now have baseline data which can be shared with the Pharmacy Curriculum Committee, Assessment Committee and the faculty who teach the Introductory and D&D courses. Changes to content delivery and teaching styles can now be monitored for their effectiveness in achieving maximum learning outcomes for the largest number of students. • Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficients • Introductory Course Quartile Comparison • Discussion • 1. Student performance on examinations • a. Overall, average student grades on discipline-specific questions were modestly lower than the average grade in the corresponding Introductory courses. Pathophysiology (71% vs 82%); MedChem (71% vs 82%); Pharmacology (78% vs82%) and Therapeutics (74% vs 82%). • b. Students performed poorly in some discipline-specific areas: • Pathophysiology in D&D Cardio-Renal 1 and 2 (58% and 54%) and D&D in Neoplasia (54%). This may be reflective of the difficulty of the pathology of these two systems as well as the relative small number of questions allocated on the examinations (10%). • Pharmacology in D&D of Cardio-Renal 2 system (63%). This may also be reflective of the difficulty of the pharmacology of the various drug classes. • MedChem in D&D of Infectious diseas (ID) (63%). ID is the first D&D in the sequence and students may be struggling to adapt to the blocked program and to team teaching. • Introduction • The College’s entry-level Pharm.D. curriculum contains a sequence of nine Drugs and Disease courses (D&Ds) that integrates didactic content from Pathophysiology, Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology and Therapeutics. The D&D courses are delivered in a block sequence over 3 semesters with 3 D&Ds offered each semester (Fall and Spring of P-2 and Fall of P-3). Currently the D&Ds are, sequentially: Infectious Disease, Skin and Connective Tissue, Cardio-Renal 1, Cardio-Renal 2, Respiratory System, Nervous System, Neoplasia, Endocrine and Reproductive Systems, and Gastro-Intestinal and Genital-Urinary Systems. Ongoing faculty concerns about issues related to student competence in discipline-specific didactic knowledge within the integrated course sequence resulted in a formal assessment study of knowledge retention. • Methods • Summative methods to establish a benchmark for the achievement of competence in each of the four didactic components of the integrated course sequence include: • Evaluation of student performance on embedded content–specific examination questions • Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients between grades achieved in the discipline-specific introductory courses and in each didactic area of the integrated courses • Evaluation of student performance determined by sorting introductory course grades into quartiles and comparing them to whether the student performance improved, decreased or remained the same in discipline-specific content across the D&Ds. • Students take a midterm and final examination in each D&D. The examinations consist of 50 multiple choice questions (5 Pathophysiology and 15 questions related to each of the other content areas). Student test scores in each didactic area were graded using Scantron ParScore software. Pearson-Product-Moment Correlation Coefficients were calculated between discipline-specific introductory courses (General Pathology, Introduction to Pharmaceutical Care, Introduction to Medicinal Chemistry, and Introduction to Pharmacology) and student scores in the respective didactic areas using MS Excel data analysis software. Calculation of student success ratios were also calculated using MS Excel software. • Results • Average Student Grades on Embedded Content-Specific Questions and Average Grades in Discipline-Specific Introductory Courses