White, Paul J

Davis, Elizabeth A

Santiago, Marina

Angelo, Tom

Shield, Alison

Babey, Anna-Marie

Kemp-Harper, Barbara

Maynard, Gregg

Al-Sallami, Hesham S

Musgrave, Ian F

Fernandes, Lynette B

Ngo, Suong N T

Hinton, Tina

2021-08

Pharmacology education currently lacks an agreed knowledge curriculum. Evidence from physics and biology education indicates that core concepts are useful and effective structures around which such a curriculum can be designed to facilitate student learning. Building on previous work, we developed a novel, criterion-based method to identify the core concepts of pharmacology education. Five novel criteria were developed, based on a literature search, to separate core concepts in pharmacology from topics and facts. Core concepts were agreed to be big ideas, enduring, difficult, applicable across contexts, and useful to solve problems. An exploratory survey of 33 pharmacology educators from Australia and New Zealand produced 109 terms, which were reduced to a working list of 26 concepts during an online workshop. Next, an expert group of 12 educators refined the working list to 19 concepts, by applying the five criteria and consolidating synonyms, and added three additional concepts that emerged during discussions. A confirmatory survey of a larger group resulted in 17 core concepts of pharmacology education. This list may be useful for educators to evaluate existing curricula, design new curricula, and to inform the development of a concept inventory to test attainment of the core concepts in pharmacology.

Pharmacology Research & Perspectives, 9(5), p. 1-13

2052-1707

34288559

https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/31477

en

John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Attribution 4.0 International

Identifying the core concepts of pharmacology education

Journal Article

Publication