Presentation and Quality Evaluation of a Novel Learning Method for Pharmacy Students in Drug Information Course

Abstract:

Introduction: Personal computers or laptops and smartphones has been used to change the lecture based traditional class to an interactive workshop to educate the knowledge and skills necessary for using drug information resources in clerkship courses. Methods: After the needs assessment and educational facilities, the appropriate drug information questions corresponding to each source were designed. Students used their laptops and smartphones to find the answer to drug information questions. The OSCE exam was taken at the end of the course to evaluate the skills obtained by the students. The scores of knowledge exam and OSCE skills exam of this group were compared with students of the previous period. The data were analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistic, Paired t-Test, and Pearson Correlation. Results: The mean scores of the knowledge exam compare to prior group increased significantly (6.79 ± 0.78 in group I, 9.96 ± 0.91 in Group II, P-value<0.01). Moreover, the OSCE exam scores (6.15 ± 0.88) improved significantly (P-value<0.05) in comparison to the scores of the previous traditional lecture-based classes (4.97 ± 0.73). Conclusions: Our method to train drug information resources by the using of laptop and smartphones could be an appropriate method to improve the quality of education, students’ knowledge, and skills.

Key words: Drug information education resources, Laptop, Smart phone, Pharmacy, clerkship course.