Impact of debates on student perceptions and competency scores in the advanced pharmacy practice setting

Up for Debate: Re-Envisioning the Journal Club with an Article-Centric Student Debate

“…Toor et al found that students perceived themselves to have more confidence in finding, comparing, and retaining relevant information from primary literature following the activity. 5 Similar improvements in student confidence were seen by Dy-Boarman et al 4 In both instances, student satisfaction with the activity was high, and many were pleased with the development of their skills as a result of the activity.…”

“…In pharmacy curricula, debates have been successfully implemented in both the didactic and experiential settings; however, evidence in the experiential setting is sparse. [3][4][5] To the best of our knowledge, there are only two reports supporting implementation of a debate activity into pharmacy experiential education, and only one of which explicitly developed the debate as a novel format for a journal club, specifically. 4,5 In both examples, students explore literature analysis in the context of a clinical controversy by being assigned to debate a specific position within a clinical context.…”

“…[3][4][5] To the best of our knowledge, there are only two reports supporting implementation of a debate activity into pharmacy experiential education, and only one of which explicitly developed the debate as a novel format for a journal club, specifically. 4,5 In both examples, students explore literature analysis in the context of a clinical controversy by being assigned to debate a specific position within a clinical context. Toor et al found that students perceived themselves to have more confidence in finding, comparing, and retaining relevant information from primary literature following the activity.…”

Impact of using debates in a pharmacoeconomic course on students’ self-reported perceptions of skills acquired

“…The instructors assessed the outcome of this teaching technique using pre-and post-debate questionnaires. The questionnaires were developed on the basis of previous literature (Dy-Boarman et al, 2018;Viswesh et al, 2018) and underwent revisions by the instructors for face and Alaqeel et al…”

“…The literature describes the use of debates in pharmacy courses such pharmacokinetics (Erstad & Murphy, 1994), critical care (Hawkins, Fulford, & Phan, 2019), antimicrobial stewardship (McGee, Pius, & Mukherjee, 2019), pharmacotherapy (Charrois & Appleton, 2013), infectious disease therapeutics (Viswesh, Yang, & Gupta, 2018), ethics (Hanna et al, 2014), immunisations (Blackmer, Diez, & Klein, 2014), ambulatory care (Moore et al, 2015), selfcare (Lampkin et al, 2015), and advanced pharmacy practice experience (Dy-Boarman et al, 2018). The findings of these studies suggest that engaging in debate activities ultimately helped students improve their self-reported perceptions of abilities to evaluate the literature; develop Alaqeel et al Pharmacy Educa,on 21(1) 276 -282 277 evidence-based clinical decisions, reason, and structured arguments; think critically; and communicate information effectively.…”