Evaluation of Health Science Examination of Pharmacy Students Using Critical Thinking Ability

Abstract

This research aims to find a link between how well pharmacy students did on the Health Science Examination (HSE) and how well they did on a task that tests their critical thinking skills (package insert). Pharmacy students in their first year were given the HSE as part of a spring term task to help them think critically.  The box insert project was finished as part of a pharmacokinetics course in the same semester. The correlation analysis was used to check for a link between HSE scores and project grades. A weak but significant link existed between the learners' grades on the task and their overall HSE rating. Team-Based Learning (TBL) is a way of teaching that gets students to learn by doing and by getting them to think critically about how to solve problems. Given a weak but meaningful link with HSE scores, this study showed that a package insert task could be used to test pharmacy students' critical thinking skills.