Teaching Pharmacology in 2010--new knowledge, new tools, new attitudes

Teaching and learning pharmacology in Brazil before COVID-19 pandemic: a case study in Rio de Janeiro

BACKGROUND

Knowledge of pharmacology is crucial for physicians to perform rational and safe medicine. Medical professionals are responsible for prescribing drugs and a weak performace of those can result in medication errors leading to disability, hospitalization, and death, among other situations. It occurs worldwide, including in Brazil, so that learning pharmacology impacts on public health service. We aim to investigate the current pharmacology educational practices in medical schools in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

METHODS

We surveyed 14 of 22 medical schools in Rio de Janeiro. Pharmacology teachers (n=16) and medical students (n=89) answered a semi-structured questionnaire that included questions about the staff characteristics, pharmacology content, teacher's concepts, and common practices and resources that were used in pharmacology classes.

RESULTS

Our results revealed that the medical schools had similar overall curriculums. Pharmacology teachers work more than 30hs a week (75%) and conducted both research and teaching (62.5%). We also found that the multimedia projector was the most common resource (71.9%), and passive pedagogical methodologies (e.g., expository classes) remain a current strategy in pharmacology classes (89.9%). In general, medical students are poorly motivated (55%), which may be related to their performance in assessments. In addition, students believe that pharmacology is a complex (52%) or very complex subject (46%) since for its full understanding the student needs concepts from other disciplines, which can have an impact on the performance and motivation of students. As a result, these medical students do not fully understand the integration between pharmacology's basic concepts and their clinical applications.

CONCLUSION

These data seem to demonstrate that the adopted teaching and learning pharmacology strategies and methodologies can be improved in Rio de Janeiro.

Measuring the effectiveness of pharmacology teaching in undergraduate medical students

OBJECTIVE

Information overload and recent curricular changes are viewed as important contributory factors to insufficient pharmacological education of medical students. This study was designed to assess the effectiveness of pharmacology teaching in our medical school.

METHODS

The study subjects were 455 second-year medical students, class of 2010, and 26 pharmacology teachers at the National University of Mexico Medical School. To assess pharmacological knowledge, students were required to take 3 multiple-choice exams (70 questions each) as part of their evaluation in the pharmacology course. A 30-item questionnaire was used to explore the students' opinion on teaching. Pharmacology professors evaluated themselves using a similar questionnaire. Students and teachers rated each statement on a 5-point Likert scale.

RESULTS

The groups' exam scores ranged from 54.5% to 90.0% of correct responses, with a mean score of 77.3%. Only 73 (16%) of 455 students obtained an exam score of 90% and higher. Students' evaluations of faculty and professor self-ratings were very high (90% and 96.2%, of the maximal response, respectively). Student and professor ratings were not correlated with exam scores (r = 0.291).

CONCLUSIONS

Our study shows that knowledge on pharmacology is incomplete in a large proportion of second-year medical students and indicates that there is an urgent need to review undergraduate training in pharmacology. The lack of relationship between the subjective ratings of teacher effectiveness and objective exam scores suggests the use of more demanding measures to assess the effectiveness of teaching.

Replacing animal use in physiology and pharmacology teaching in selected universities in Eastern Europe--charting a way forward

The aims of this study were to explore the use of animals in teaching and the implementation of innovative technology-based teaching practices across a small sample of universities in Eastern Europe. The research methods used were a questionnaire circulated four weeks before a workshop took place (in October 2009, in Belgrade, Serbia), as well as focused, face-to-face group discussions, led by one of the authors during the workshop. Twenty-two faculty (physiologists and pharmacologists), from 13 Eastern European countries, attended the meeting. Fourteen of the eighteen schools represented at the workshop were making use of animals, in some instances in quite large numbers, for their teaching. For example, a single department at a Romanian university used over 250 animals per annum, and at least 1130 animals were used, per annum, across all of the institutions. The species used in largest numbers were the rat (34%), frog/toad (29%), mouse (22%), rabbit (10%), guinea-pig (4%) and dog (1%). None of the universities sampled had implemented institution-wide virtual learning environments (VLEs), although there were isolated instances of local use of VLEs. There was relatively little current use of technology-based teaching and learning resources, but there was considerable enthusiasm to modernise teaching and to introduce innovative learning and teaching methods. The major perceived barrier to the introduction of replacement alternatives was the lack of versions in local languages. There was a consensus view that developing local language exemplars and evaluating their usefulness was likely to have the greatest impact on animal use, at least in the short-term.