Development and Assessment of a Horizontally Integrated Biological Sciences Course Sequence for Pharmacy Education

Abstract

Objective. To design and assess a horizontally integrated biological sciences course sequence and to determine its effectiveness in imparting the foundational science knowledge necessary to successfully progress through the pharmacy school curriculum and produce competent pharmacy school graduates. Design. A 2-semester course sequence integrated principles from several basic science disciplines: biochemistry, molecular biology, cellular biology, anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology. Each is a 5-credit course taught 5 days per week, with 50-minute class periods. Assessment. Achievement of outcomes was determined with course examinations, student lecture, and an annual skills mastery assessment. The North American Pharmacist Licensure Examination (NAPLEX) results were used as an indicator of competency to practice pharmacy. Conclusion. Students achieved course objectives and program level outcomes. The biological sciences integrated course sequence was successful in providing students with foundational basic science knowledge required to progress through the pharmacy program and to pass the NAPLEX. The percentage of the school's students who passed the NAPLEX was not statistically different from the national percentage.

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

“…Where this was included, the goals most prominently related to the design of a student learning environment to improve active and self-directed learning [10,13,16,[18][19][20]46]. There was some focus on the desire to increase student knowledge development, specifically to improve knowledge integration across different disciplines [11,12,14,21,25,28,29,32,35,36,37,39,42,44], and to augment student skills development [10,16,17,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25]32,46] e.g. critical thinking, problem-solving, and clinical reasoning.…”

“…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].…”

“…A range of teaching strategies have been adopted to deliver the integrated interventions. In most cases a mix of environments within the same intervention are described to include: problem-based learning (PBL) [10,21,31,39,40,[43][44][45][46][47], team-based learning (TBL) [27,38], case-based learning [11,14,15,[18][19][20]22,28,29,35,37,38,40,42,45], small-group teaching [10,11,14,19,34,39,45,47], interactive lectures [19,20,24,29,40,41], simulations [19,20,22] and clinical exposure/visits [10,11,13,19,…”

“…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].…”