A team public health research project for first-year pharmacy students to apply content from didactic courses

Abstract

Objectives: To implement and assess a first-year pharmacy student group research project that provided practical hands-on application and reinforced the curricula of concurrent didactic courses.

Design: Groups of 6 to 7 students chose a public health topic based on the Healthy People 2010 Priority Areas and created a survey instrument. Faculty facilitated mock institutional review board (IRB) review sessions which provided teams with ongoing feedback and refinement recommendations before each team administered their survey instrument to a predefined population. Data analysis, formal written reports, and oral presentations were presented to peers and project faculty members.

Assessment: Teams complied with the requirements of the mock IRB, effectively applied basic research principles learned in class, collected survey data, performed inferential statistical analyses on the data, , and presented their project findings. Two-hundred six of 210 students (98%) reported feeling satisfied with both the results of their project and the accomplishments of their team.

Conclusions: Teams applied a varied skill set including primary literature evaluation, basic research principles, statistics, public speaking, and peer collaboration in conducting a public health research project. First-year pharmacy students may benefit from participation in a collaborative research project that provides hands-on application of material being taught in didactic courses.

Keywords: curriculum; public health; research.

Figure 1

Relationship between first-year year pharmacy students' perceptions of research and the number of years of college completed prior to entering the PharmD program.