The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 275 No 7361 p171
6 August 2005

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Pharmacy education

Assessing students in traditional, practice and virtual environments

Colin Chapman, dean of the Victorian College of Pharmacy at Monash University, Australia, opened the symposium by addressing delegates on the pivotal role of assessment and its impact on students and how assessment drives student learning. New teaching methods and an evolving role for pharmacists require educators to be innovative in their assessment of students, whether using traditional formats in novel ways or by embracing more competence-based approaches, he said.

Tom Zlatic, St Louis College of Pharmacy, US, took these thoughts further and told delegates that assessment should be seen as part of the student learning experience in a curriculum that delivers clearly defined and measurable learning outcomes. He saw pharmacy education as being ability based, with knowledge, skills and attitudes forming each ability outcome. He outlined four steps in delivering an ability-based course:

· Defining the ability outcome

· Allowing students to practise the desired ability frequently

· Setting clear criteria for students on what knowledge, skills and values make up good practice of that ability outcome

· Providing criteria and evidence-based feedback on a student’s competence in relation to the outcome through formative assessment

In this way all levels of learning, using Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, can be achieved.

Later through workshops, Professor Zlatic asked delegates to explore issues surrounding the teaching and assessment of professionalism. He reported on the American model of service learning, where pharmacy students undergo structured community service to develop caring attitudes and compassion towards recipients of care. Delegates agreed that building student confidence, self-worth and identity were crucial in cultivating feelings of empathy and professional integrity in pharmacy students.

Ieva Stupens, associate professor at the University of South Australia, held workshops on how to write multiple choice questions (MCQs) that test not only knowledge and recall but also higher levels of learning such as analysis and evaluation. Delegates concluded that writing MCQs was easy but writing high quality MCQs that did not just test knowledge was a difficult and time-consuming task.

Other plenary speakers shared their experiences with delegates on assessing student competence. Paul Rutter, formerly of the University of Portsmouth, spoke on the use of objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) to measure student competence when dealing with clinical scenarios that mimic real practice. He moved on to question the validity of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s registration examination as a true measure of student competence and challenged whether a single-format MCQ examination was appropriate for assessing the right to practise. He suggested using a combination assessment which retains some of the current format but introduces an OSCE-style element to ensure that both knowledge and application of it were tested.

Claire Anderson, of the University of Nottingham School of Pharmacy, highlighted the challenges and some of the solutions to assessing students in the practice environment. Using a range of assessment formats was crucial, from competency assessment to portfolios of evidence. All were valid tools but Professor Anderson added that student numbers and the labour intensiveness of some assessment formats posed significant challenges.

Ann Lewis, Secretary and Registrar of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, provided an overview of issues surrounding competency with particular emphasis on the Society’s research on knowledge, skills and attitudes for future pharmacy roles. While foreseeing a need to assess fitness-to-practise through competency testing, the challenge was not just to determine who should be assessed and at which stage of practice but also whether it was the responsibility of the employer, the regulator or both to assess the competency of practising pharmacists.

Janie Sheridan, associate professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, discussed plagiarism and cheating in assessment, and shared her experiences using an electronic plagiarism detection program (Turnitin). The program allows educators to check how much information has been “cut and pasted” from internet sources. Students were found generally to accept submitting assignments via Turnitin and recognised a need on their part for better referencing, although they wanted more feedback from tutors on their marked work.

The final plenary presentation by Laurie Lomas, of King’s College London, repositioned assessment as a key component of a “constructively aligned” course, where the curriculum delivers specific learning outcomes that form the basis of the assessment. Traditionally, teachers take on the role of imparting knowledge to students and are thus seen as the most appropriate assessors of student knowledge, although marking remains highly subjective. Recent subject reviews of pharmacy in the UK indicated an over-reliance on traditional examinations that test recall of knowledge rather than higher-level cognitive skills, and also indicated a lack of constructive feedback to students. Involving students in the assessment process through, for example, self- and peer-assessment, leads to a participatory role and can in turn motivate students in their own learning.